Conferinta „Competentele de maine la Iasi”, la Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza”
Camera Franceza de Comert, Industrie si Agricultura în România (CCIFER), în parteneriat cu Agentia Universitara a Francofoniei (AUF), Institutul Francez din Iasi si Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” (UAIC) organizeaza, pe 5 martie 2019, conferinta „Competentele de mâine la Iasi”, organizata la Universitatea „Cuza”, in Sala Senatului.
„Ne propunem cu aceasta conferinta sa fim un facilitator între lumea academica si companii, ceea ce va aduce valoare adaugata demersului nostru de a lucra activ în aria de angajare a tinerilor.
Introducerea manifestarii va fi facuta de: prof. univ. dr. Mihaela Onofrei, rectorul de la „Cuza”, Francois Coste, presedinte CCIFER si Radu Gradinaru– Consul Onorific al Frantei la Iasi. In prim-plan vor fi temele: Competente versus piata muncii. Provocari si perspective, Importanta cunoasterii Limbii franceze în cariera, Cum amelioram calitatea programelor – francofonie si filiere francofone, Agilitate, flexibilitate: cum îsi adapteaza universitatile curricula pentru a raspunde mai bine cerintelor de pe piata muncii, prezentata de rectorul Onofrei, Nevoile de recrutare în Iasi si o masa rotunda cu prezentari si dezbatere pe cadrul juridic si fiscal în implementarea contractelor de stagiu si internship”, au transmis oficialii UAIC.
Publicație : Bună Ziua Iași
Expozitie de plante exotice, la Gradina Botanica din Iasi
Gradina Botanica „Anastasie Fatu” a Universitatii „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” (UAIC) din Iasi invita publicul sa viziteze o spectaculoasa expozitie de plante exotice. Aceasta este deschisa în perioada 16 februarie – 10 martie 2019, în compartimentele noi ale Complexului de Sere. Deschiderea evenimentului va avea loc sâmbata, 16 februarie 2019, la ora 11:00.
Cu acest prilej vor fi expuse specii si soiuri cunoscute sau mai putin cunoscute de azalee si camelii, precum si numeroase exemplare de plante originare din zone subtropicale si tropicale.
In cadrul acestei editii, printre exemplarele de plante se vor remarca si animale cu valoare simbolica, realizate cu multa imaginatie de personalul Gradinii Botanice, intr-o forma de arta topiara reinterpretata.
Astfel, printre aranjamentele florale se va remarca cocorul, considerat imagine figurativa care da viata hartiei in Arta origami. Aceasta pasare prezinta semnificatii deosebite, mai ales in cultura si traditiile japonezilor, unde este asociata cu statornicia, fiind considerat simbolul primaverii, al fericirii, al dragostei, al longevitatii, precum si al credintei maritale. Aceste pasari, care reflecta ideea de libertate, vor fi intr-o armonie desavarsita cu eleganta si rafinamentul exemplarelor de camelii si azalee.
Expozitia va fi deschisa zilnic, între orele 9:00 – 16:00. Pretul unui bilet de intrare este de cinci lei, iar pentru grupurile organizate este de trei lei. Fotografiatul este liber. Se recomanda intrarea in Gradina Botanica din strada Dumbrava Rosie, nr. 7.
Publicație : Bună Ziua Iași
Amfiteatru în aer liber, în „Tudor Vladimirescu“. Un spațiu dintre cămine, schimbat total
Acesta va fi amenajat în urma câştigării unui concurs de către doi studenţi la Arhitectură.
O echipă formată din doi studenţi de la Politehnica ieşeană a câştigat un proiect în valoare de 40.000 de lei pentru amenajarea unui spaţiu verde din Campusul „Tudor Vladimirescu“. Cei doi sunt studenţi la Facultatea de Arhitectură, banii fiind câştigaţi în cadrul competiţiei de creativitate în dezvoltarea urbană „IAŞI FORWARD by TRANSGOR LOGISTIK“, competiţie organizată de Fundaţia Comunitară Iaşi.
Echipa câştigătoare, „ArchiTistic“, formată din studenţii Georgiana Butnariu şi Mihael Ionuţ Furdu, din anul al V-lea, a gândit un proiect pentru transformarea unui spaţiu verde din Campus, spaţiul urmând să fie reamenajat complet cu fondurile câştigate şi cu sprijinul Direcţiei Servicii Studenţeşti. În acest spaţiu vor fi instalate cinci module de mobilier urban, printre care şi un amfiteatru în aer liber, unde vor putea fi organizate diferite concerte sau întâlniri ale tinerilor de la TUIASI. Spaţiul se află la intersecţia a cinci clădiri, în zona delimitată de căminele T9, T10, T11 respectiv T5-T6.
„Spaţiul este la intersecţia a cinci cămine, dintre care unul este sediul ligilor din universitate. Aşadar, cele două structuri, dintre care una întruchipează un amfiteatru, vor funcţiona ca un loc de întâlnire nu numai între studenţii din campus, ci şi între membrii ligilor, care vor putea organiza diferite evenimente culturale sau sociale“, au precizat membrii echipei.
Publicație : Ziarul de Iași și Evenimentul și Bună Ziua Iași
„Drumeţiile unui ornitolog: Păsările Iaşului“ – întâlnire cu liceenii 1
Elevii de la Colegiul „Mihai Eminescu“ vor afla mâine despre păsările Iaşului, unde pot fi acestea observate şi care sunt caracteristicile acestora.
Evenimentul, intitulat „Drumeţiile unui ornitolog: Păsările Iaşului“, va prilejui întâlnirea elevilor cu conf. dr. Carmen Gache de la Facultatea de Biologie de la Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza“ din Iaşi, care va vorbi despre modul în care sunt îngrijite păsărilor din Iaşi în perioada de iarnă şi primăvară. Manifestarea este organizată de către Biblioteca Judeţeană „Gh. Asachi“ Iaşi, în parteneriat cu Facultatea de Biologie a Universităţii „Alexandru Ioan Cuza“ Iaşi şi Colegiul Naţional „Mihai Eminescu“ Iaşi. La întâlnirea cu profesorul de la Universitatea „Cuza“ vor participa elevii Colegiului „Mihai Eminescu“ coordonaţi de profesorii Irina Diac, Alina Elena Bendescu, Tudorina Andone, Adina Căşuneanu şi Oana Sardariu. Elevii au ocazia să răsfoiască şi cărţile din fondul Bibliotecii Judeţene care tratează această temă, dar vor putea admira şi imagini din colecţia cadrului didactic de la Facultatea de Biologie. Întâlnirea cu elevii va avea loc în Sala de Festivităţi a Colegiul „Mihai Eminescu“. Evenimentul se desfăşoară în cadrul proiectului „Provocările Culturii“, care are drept scop facilitarea contactului elevilor de liceu cu diverse zone ale culturii şi interconectarea lor, prin dialog, cu specialişti din diferite domenii, personalităţi ieşene, dar şi să prezinte oferta de carte a Bibliotecii Judeţene.
Puiblicație : Ziarul de Iași
Threatened scholars: online harassment risks academic freedom
Rebekah Tromble and Patricia Rossini feared for their safety when the conservative online world turned against them last summer
Two academics who were bombarded with death and rape threats after they were selected by Twitter to research communication on the platform have warned that such incidents will make scholars afraid to speak to the public.
Rebekah Tromble, assistant professor of political communication at Leiden University, and Patricia Rossini, a postdoctoral researcher at Syracuse University in New York state, said that they had feared for their safety during an onslaught of tens of thousands of hostile tweets, comments and emails last July. Police were forced to step up patrols around Dr Tromble’s house.
Only now do the pair feel comfortable talking about their ordeal, Dr Tromble told Times Higher Education.
The online storm broke just hours after the research into civility and tolerance on Twitter was announced, as critics dug up tweets attacking US President Donald Trump made by Dr Tromble, Dr Rossini and other members of the team.
Much of the US conservative online world seized on these Trump-critical tweets as evidence that the project was likely to lead to Twitter censoring conservatives. The research even provoked criticism from Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican Party.
Within 36 hours of the research announcement, 24,000 tweets had mentioned one or more members of the team.
“I faced an overwhelming amount of death and rape threats,” said Dr Tromble.
The attacks, on Twitter, online forums and in the comment sections of news articles, ranged from some “legitimate criticism” of the project and plain insults – “you’re ugly” – to threatening emails, explained Dr Rossini.
On Twitter, there were also a number of antisemitic attacks on Dr Tromble, from users who mistakenly assumed she was Jewish.
In the early hours of the online storm, “I tried to view this with my professional, academic researcher hat on, thinking that I could keep a distance”, recalled Dr Tromble.
“But I watched for far too long, and it had a really deep effect on me,” she said. Both researchers soon turned over their Twitter accounts to others to shield themselves from the abuse and report the nastiest comments.
“We were scared, we were afraid,” said Dr Rossini. Under the weight of so many threats from so many sources, “you don’t know if these people know who you are”, she added.
In one incident shortly after the controversy blew up, Dr Rossini was at a political science conference in Boston, when one online harasser ominously mentioned he was in the city too.
“What if this guy is crazy? I’m walking around with a name tag. If he wants to find me, he could,” she said.
Even though Dr Tromble was in the Netherlands, away from the centre of anger in the US, she too received specific threats, including by one person within the country who was questioned by Dutch police.
The threats were specific enough to force Dr Tromble to vary her routine, working in a different office, taking her name off the door and leaving her phone off the hook.
“I had insomnia and panic attacks for two-and-a-half to three weeks afterwards,” she said. “Where I could tell myself rationally ‘you’re OK, you’re safe’, I couldn’t turn off the psychological and ultimately physiological response.”
“Just doing things like walking out my front door, I was doing extra checks, looking around – is there anyone else here? – literally looking over my shoulder for weeks afterwards,” she recalled.
The online backlash blew up despite the fact that the research project seeks to measure how intolerant debate is about, for example, immigration, or to work out whether users are simply inhabiting echo chambers of left- or right-wing views. It does not aim to develop ways to flag or censor tweets.
Twitter “won’t be able to use our work to ask: is this specific tweet intolerant?”, explained Dr Tromble.
But given the “overwhelming” amount of criticism that came flooding in, it became “impossible” to explain the nuances of the project to critics online, said Dr Rossini.
As for accusations of the team’s anti-Trump bias, Dr Tromble said she welcomed genuine scrutiny of its research methods. “If I were going to hide my views to pretend I’m apolitical, I think that would actually be much, much more problematic,” she added.
When the project, set to start this year, does eventually yield findings, the team face the delicate task of communicating the results without provoking another round of hatred. “There’s no doubt that we will risk continued backlash,” said Dr Tromble.
Such online harassment cannot “silence” academics, argued Dr Rossini, but the danger is that such a backlash makes it harder to speak to the public.
“It runs the risk of pushing us back behind our walled garden,” said Dr Tromble, who warned: “If we can’t talk to the public, it diminishes academic freedom, it diminishes the work itself.”
Publicație : The Times
Universities must ensure that all students acquire ICT skills
Evidence from Canada highlights the scale of the challenge in preparing 21st-century workers and citizens, say Ross Finnie, Arthur Sweetman and Richard Mueller
Collaborate and listen: Leicester’s plan is to push income into the four hubs
Digital technology is a driving economic and social force, and the increasing need to develop strong information and communication technology skills represents a growing challenge for the Canadian postsecondary education sector.
Forecasts of impending shortages are often greeted with scepticism. However, a recent special edition of the journal Canadian Public Policy – which we edited and in which all of the findings referenced in this article were published – contains a paper revealing that between 1987 and 2016, employment in narrowly defined ICT occupations grew much more than in the rest of the labour market. The number of Canadians in such jobs increased from about 2 per cent to about 5.6 per cent of all workers.
Another paper contains strong evidence that ICT skills are required throughout the labour market, and also for individuals to function effectively as citizens. Even having minimal ICT skills, as opposed to none at all, is observed to increase labour market earnings appreciably.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development defines three categories of ICT skills: “specialist or advanced”, “generic” and “complementary”. Specialists, such as computer programmers or website developers, produce ICT products and services. Workers with generic skills use ICT technologies in their jobs. And complementary skills permit workers to improve their productivity in a variety of tasks, such as by interacting with computerised inventory systems.
Postsecondary education institutions are tasked with providing appropriate learning opportunities in all three categories – each of which offers its own challenges.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, university instructors are increasingly pointing to the need for ICT specialists to have a wide skill set in order to be effective in the workplace. For example, members of the faculty of engineering and applied science at Canada’s Queen’s University point out that professional and regulatory ICT bodies’ expectations now go far beyond professional knowledge, programming and related technical skills. Also required are a wider range of competencies, including problem solving, multidisciplinary team-working and self-management.
Some of these competencies correspond with what were once called “soft skills”, but that are now known by terms such as “21st-century skills” or “transferable skills”. To make progress in these domains, the authors call for a “continuous improvement model” that integrates curriculum design with activities and assessments deliberately selected to develop the whole range of required skills, embedded in the context of each discipline – as opposed to being taught separately.
Members of the Canadian Business/Higher Education Roundtable argue that “all companies are technology companies” given that organisations of all types need workers who can navigate the digital world. Like their counterparts from engineering, the authors advocate for the development of both technological literacy and wider skill sets, including in the generic and complementary ICT skill categories.
These authors argue, in particular, for increased interactions between postsecondary education and the world of work, including the immersion of ICT students in various forms of “work-integrated learning”, including, where relevant, related private-sector research environments. But successful approaches involve collaborative efforts by industry and government – postsecondary institutions cannot do it on their own – and typically require the creation and involvement of formal organisations representing multiple stakeholders (including governments and employers) with these broad skills objectives.
Postsecondary institutions need to be pushing in many directions simultaneously. There is a strong imperative for them to produce graduates with specialist skills specific to each discipline or occupation. But they must also facilitate the development of generic and complementary ICT skills across the entire student body. The same is true of transferable skills more generally. This breadth and depth of demand will not be easy to meet. But it is essential that universities meet it if societies and economies are to flourish in our rapidly changing technological environment.
Ross Finnie is director of the Education Policy Research Initiative (EPRI) and professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. Richard E. Mueller is associate director of EPRI and professor of economics at the University of Lethbridge. Arthur Sweetman is associate director of EPRI and professor of economics at McMaster University.
Publicație : The Times
Arts universities struggle for survival in US
Institutions struggle to cope with changing student tastes, demographic shifts and the difficulty of scaling up their model
t’s no secret that the US’ private, non-profit art colleges have been showing cracks in recent years.
In just the past several months, the Oregon College of Art and Craft explored mergers with two different institutions, only to have talks fall apart. The University of New Haven decided in August to end degree-granting programmes at Lyme Academy, whose academic programmes it took over under an agreement five years ago. Last week, the Cornish College of the Arts announced that it is cutting tuition fees by 20 per cent in the 2019-20 academic year, adopting a “tuition reset” strategy that has frequently been deployed by institutions seeking a shot of attention to help boost enrolment. And the New Hampshire Institute of Art is in the midst of merging into New England College.
A bit further in the past, the Memphis College of Art announced in October 2017 that it would be closing and has laid out plans to shut down after graduating the last of its students in May 2020. The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston reached an agreement to have its educational operations acquired by Tufts University in 2016. The Art Institute of Boston, which merged with Lesley University in 1998, moved from Boston to Cambridge to join its sister colleges in 2015, taking on the new name of the Lesley University College of Art and Design along the way.
Also in 2015, the Montserrat College of Art explored merging into Salem State University, but the two sides ultimately ruled out the move. That decision came the year after George Washington University decided to acquire the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington.
Those cases alone mean that about a fifth of the 43 institutions that were members of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design as of the start of 2014 have attempted to merge, closed, relocated or drastically changed their tuition structure in the past five years.
They’ve done so while facing some pressures unique to art schools, according to leaders in the sector. Curriculum changes make it more difficult for some students to take classes before they graduate from high school, meaning art schools must work harder to reach prospective students at an early age. Meanwhile, art schools remain capital-intensive operations to run, as supplies, equipment, small class sizes and generous faculty-to-student ratios keep expenses high.
But art schools have also been under pressures that cut across the higher education landscape and are bearing down on many liberal arts colleges. Population and demographic shifts are changing where high schoolers are graduating in the greatest numbers, who those students are, what they can pay and what they value in a college education. And as the cost of providing students with a good education rises annually, many small institutions struggle to keep costs in line without the benefits of efficiencies of scale.
“I often say we are a microcosm of the higher ed environment,” said Deborah Obalil, president and executive director of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design. “There are challenges in particular to the very small, under-500-student institutions. I think that is applicable across all of higher ed, because the challenges they face are not special to them because they are art and design institutions. It is really about their scale.”
The art school market is bifurcating based on institution size. Although enrolment remains strong across a core group of institutions, those with more than 500 students are much more likely to see their fortunes rise than are those with smaller enrolments, observers say. Some of the best-known larger institutions, such as the Rhode Island School of Design and the California Institute of the Arts, are considered to be doing quite well, even though they are not huge, with reported enrolments of about 2,500 and 1,500, respectively.
The pressures playing out at colleges of art may resonate particularly strongly now because some struggling private liberal arts colleges have been taking steps that could make them resemble art schools. Strategists sometimes counsel endangered liberal arts colleges to find an area of focus or a special niche to fill – paralleling art schools, which arguably embody the ideal of specialisation.
Now, that ideal has been called into question after Green Mountain College, which had carved out a niche in environmental liberal arts, decided last month to close in the face of financial challenges.
Backers of art schools say the personalised education they provide and the creative thinking they inspire are more important than ever in a world where students from all disciplines will need to be able to adapt their skills to a fast-changing workplace. But as pressures play out in the market, it’s become increasingly clear that some institutions have been able to continue to attract students and pay their bills, while others have fallen behind.
It’s also growing more and more clear that small institutions with negligible endowments and other disadvantages can’t always count on clever strategy alone to save them – whether that strategy is merger, debt reorganisation or specialisation. Art school presidents think that sound decisions can still strengthen most institutions, but they need to be deployed with increasing sophistication.
Specialty institutions can remain viable if they examine their business models and revenue streams, said Kurt Steinberg, president of the Montserrat College of Art and a former executive vice-president at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, who spent a year as acting president there. Only they must be making the right choices quickly “and defining who they are and why they have a competitive advantage”.
By some measures, art schools are enrolling more students than they did a decade ago.
As a group, the institutions in the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design enrolled 34,466 undergraduates in 2018. That’s an increase of 2.4 per cent from 2008, which would be roughly in line with projections showing very little growth in the number of high school graduates over the same period.
But the data include only 32 institutions that are based in the US, fully independent and still enrolling new students. They don’t include small institutions that merged with larger institutions in recent years, nor do they include closing institutions, such as the Memphis College of Art.
With a few exceptions, most of the association’s member institutions that enrol more than 500 students have seen enrolment rebound in the past few years, while those with fewer than 500 have seen it fall, Ms Obalil said. It’s not clear whether 500 is a firm dividing line or just happens to be the current level at which institutional fortunes are diverging.
“In terms of the schools that have actually closed or merged, each picture is unique, to some degree,” Ms Obalil said. “What commonalities I’ve seen often line up, again, with size and the inability to scale.”
Such institutions have failed to differentiate themselves from the rest of the marketplace, or they have not reconsidered their curricula in five, 10 or even 20 years, she added. Some can’t add another programme because they are too small to afford it, and others are faced with a high level of debt.
Art schools don’t tend to have large endowments, so a combination of high debt and a failure to attract enough students can be a fatal combination.
Such a combination helped to bring down the Memphis College of Art. The college saw its undergraduate enrolment fall from 362 in 2009 to 338 in 2016, according to statistics in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. By 2017, enrolment had fallen to 278.
The college struggled to attract students in the post-recession era, said its president, Laura Hine. Students and families were questioning the value of a four-year art degree and emphasising job skills even as the college grappled with its identity.
“There was a sense that we’re a fine arts school, and we can’t abandon our history and our roots,” Ms Hine said.
Looking back, Ms Hine thinks the college could have built sustainable programmes while balancing the need to stay true to the fine arts with new investments. It could have used its animation programme, which is the only one of its kind in the region and was in demand, as a foundation.
As it faced new challenges related to enrolment and programming, the college’s past decisions caught up to it. The college was struggling with debt from real estate purchases made in the past, Ms Hine said. Although leaders attempted to reduce debt levels and to secure lower interest rates, they couldn’t do enough.
In October 2017, the college announced that its board had decided to stop recruiting new students, to dissolve the institution’s assets and to teach out existing students. At the time, it cited “declining enrolment, overwhelming real estate debt, and no viable long-term plan for financial sustainability”.
Without a large endowment to draw on, the college had been relying on revenue from enrolment and the philanthropic community, which had been exceptionally generous, Ms Hine said. Major donors were tapping out, though.
Soon after announcing its plans to close, the college staged a transfer fair, encouraging new freshmen to enrol in another institution, Ms Hine said. It moved to teach out remaining students, which has been a challenge because tuition revenue shrinks as students leave and new classes aren’t recruited. The college expects to graduate its last students in May 2020.
Larger colleges with more diversified funding from states or other sources might be better positioned to survive or thrive in the face of pressures, Ms Hine said. Some college presidents worry that too many art schools being affiliated with states could diminish students’ freedoms, however. State funding brings in political considerations that budding artists don’t always appreciate.
Ms Hine also worries about the students who are “born artists” and would have enrolled at the Memphis College of Art were it not closing.
“We were attracting and have attracted kids – a lot of kids – that were coming out of poverty,” Ms Hine said. “Some of our kids live with their family members. They can’t up and move to Sarasota, Florida. They don’t have the capacity to do that and the support to do that.”
The experience leaves Ms Hine, who has worked in workforce development, worried about the future of art schools and education more generally.
“The disparity between people’s ability to pay for college now and what it used to be, I think, is growing increasingly greater,” she said. “And in a situation where colleges and universities today have a lot of costs – technology, security, Title IX compliance, accreditation burdens that have become more and more onerous on the cost side – and you don’t have it being offset by this burgeoning middle class or upper middle class that can send their kids to school, I think it’s a crisis brewing.”
This is an edited version of a story that first appeared on Inside Higher Ed.
Publicație : The Times
Universities propose Europe-wide professional body for teaching
Continental version of UK’s former Higher Education Academy among suggestions on how to boost educational standards
Universities have proposed the creation of a Europe-wide professional body for teaching enhancement, in a bid to drive up educational standards.
A report published by the European Universities Association on 14 February proposes a set of models that could address the “patchy” use of teaching enhancement in higher education institutions, including the creation of a European professional body modelled on the UK’s former Higher Education Academy.
The HEA, now part of AdvanceHE, was a professional body that developed a professional standards framework for universities, offered training and certified professional development courses.
“Such a professional organisation would contribute to building a shared agenda that values learning and teaching at a European level, following a supportive, peer- and membership-based approach,” the EUA report says.
The EUA says that the new organisation, which would be funded by a mix of membership fees, grants and sale of services, could offer teaching certificates. However, the paper cautions that countries with similar national schemes would be unlikely to find this useful.
And it adds that defining professional standards on a continent-wide basis “may be a complex task, and might not be appropriate given the diversity of higher education systems”.
Other suggestions in the report include the establishment of networks of institutional centres for teaching and learning, the creation of a network of advisory bodies to support national approaches, and for university consortia to develop collaborative staff development programmes.
According to the EUA, a Europe-wide teaching enhancement approach would not only facilitate the exchange of ideas and teaching traditions between countries and promote greater scrutiny of the teaching that goes on in universities but would also help to achieve parity of esteem between teaching and research in academic careers.
Michael Gaebel, director of the EUA’s higher education policy unit, told Times Higher Education that the association was responding to the lack of formal pedagogical training for lecturers in many European countries.
“We looked at the teaching enhancement offers, such as training and pedagogical staff development, and found that there was an acceptance that it was an issue to address,” Mr Gaebel said.
The EUA report says that institutions are left to develop their own approaches to teaching enhancement in most European countries.
“On the one hand this is good: institutions have different missions and needs and are therefore able to tailor it to their needs; but on the other hand, it could be more helpful to have a collective approach and coordination among higher education, to share resources and approaches,” Mr Gaebel said. “That would be a good argument for the recommendation to have a European academy, like the HEA.”
Mr Gaebel admitted that it “might be difficult to develop the one European academy that would serve all the needs that are there in the sector”. It would also likely require a major investment and would need a clear and sustainable business model, he said. “That’s why we came up with a range of proposals and will continue to develop them.”
Publicație : The Times
Will China be the new centre of gravity in world of research?
Simon Baker examines the rise of China as a research nation and the worries this provokes among some Westerners
No article on current geopolitical trends is complete without prominent mention of China’s challenge to US hegemony. This is especially true of global higher education, where the huge amount of money being poured into China’s research budget is prompting questions about whether it might be just a few years from becoming the world’s leading research nation.
But how exactly can that tipping point be identified? And if China does “overtake” the US, what will that mean for global research priorities, international collaboration and scientific standards?
A starting point for examining China’s rise is often the data on how quickly it has ramped up its research output. For instance, between 1997 and 2017, it grew its number of articles, reviews and conference papers indexed in Elsevier’s Scopus database by a staggering 1,322 per cent. This compares with 64 per cent for the US and 111 per cent for members of the European Union.
Although China remains just short of matching the US on volume, it already produces more papers in at least a dozen subject areas, including computer science and engineering, and it has been predicted that it could surpass the US overall in Scopus by 2022. Meanwhile, measures of research output that look at authors’ exact fractional contribution to each paper have even suggested that the US is already behind.
However, research volume is arguably a crude metric on which to measure scientific prowess since it takes no account of the quality of what is produced. When proxies for quality are compared, China is further from matching the US, but the gap is undeniably closing here, too.
On field-weighted citation impact, a measure in Scopus that takes account of varying citation patterns in different subjects, the US and the EU maintain a healthy lead. But China’s score has risen from less than half the world average at the turn of the millennium to almost matching the world average in 2017 (see top graph, page 37). And while the US is well above the world average, it has been declining slowly since 2014. An analysis carried out by Elsevier last year suggested that if these trends continue, China could overtake the US on field-weighted citation impact by the mid-2020s.
Meanwhile, on the percentage of scholarship whose citation count is in the top 1 per cent in its field, China overtook the EU in 2016 and looks set to match the US by 2020 on current trends.
This increase in quality is reflected in the fact that Chinese researchers are now publishing much more extensively in the most prestigious journals. The latest release of the Nature Index, which analyses research published in 82 high-quality natural science journals, shows that although China’s authorship count in 2017 was still just under half that of the US, it had jumped by 13 per cent in just one year.
However, one question that always emerges when China’s rise is discussed is whether wrongdoing or game-playing has distorted the picture. For example, China has been involved in some of the most high-profile and widespread examples of suspected peer review fraud that have been uncovered in recent years. Typically, such fraud occurs when the email addresses of the authors’ suggested peer reviewers turn out to be controlled by the authors themselves or by companies connected to them.
In April 2017, more than 100 Chinese-authored papers were retracted en masse by the journal Tumor Biology after editors found “strong reason to believe that the peer review process was compromised”.
And according to data from Retraction Watch and published by the website Quartz in 2017, Chinese-authored papers accounted for more than half of the retractions for fake peer review between 2012 and 2016, while Taiwan accounted for another 15 per cent – the second highest amount. However, at 276 and 73 papers out of a total of 502 papers, it is only fair to note that the detected cases of fake peer review accounted for a minuscule proportion of the 9.3 million pieces of research published during the five years in question, according to Scopus.
Chinese research faces other issues, too. Plagiarism concerns are never far from the headlines, while Times Higher Education has uncovered examples of Chinese institutions making large cash offers to Western researchers in return for listing the institution on their papers, in an apparent attempt to improve their rankings. However, it is very difficult to determine the true extent of any of these practices.
Ivan Oransky, founder of Retraction Watch, says that while “in many ways fake peer review is the easiest to [spot]”, China has “many, many other problems”. He, too, is unsure of their overall impact, but believes that it is important to look at the incentives that Chinese researchers are given.
“There are a few things that happen in China that either don’t happen elsewhere, or happen on a smaller scale,” he says. One example is the bonuses offered for publishing in journals with a high impact factor. Another is the promotions for Chinese clinicians who publish.
“So it is like publish or perish on steroids. What that has given rise to…is that organised crime has realised that there is potential here,” Oransky says. This has led to companies sprouting up in China “that may claim to be doing something very legitimate but actually aren’t”. He gives the example of companies that write manuscripts for researchers and then also go on to sell those manuscripts to other researchers for submission to different journals under their own names.
Chinese research productivity: rapid growth
Oransky says that the fixation on whether China is overtaking the US on research volume – which in his view is an “irresponsible” way to assess relative performance – does not help matters. “I’m sure the Chinese government loves that, so it is going to create incentives for people to publish more papers,” he warns.
For Rui Yang, associate dean for cross-border and international engagement at the University of Hong Kong, the high-profile episodes of fraud have a knock-on effect for Chinese science that will harm it in the long run. “The immediate effect is that international circles [lose] trust in China’s research, and scholars are no longer keen to work with Chinese colleagues,” he points out.
This reputational risk is not lost on the Chinese government. It came down hard on the more than 400 academics implicated in the Tumor Biology case and, last year, announced a range of reforms designed to clamp down on academic misconduct. The recording of instances in a national database could lead to the researchers involved being blacklisted and prevented from accessing future funding or jobs.
Nicholas Steneck, an expert in research integrity at the University of Michigan, says it is “too early to tell” if China’s crackdown will bear fruit. But, he adds, when assessing the impact of misconduct on Chinese research it is also important to remember that the problems are not confined to China.
“It certainly would help if publication incentives were more realistic, but that is true in most countries,” he says. “Globally, there is too much misconduct in research. No country can sit back and say: ‘We are doing a good job.’”
He concedes that the difficulty of controlling China’s gigantic research system means that it “may have more questionable publications than other countries. But it also does excellent research based on high standards of integrity. I think China should be given a chance to show that it is making a sincere effort to improve integrity.”
Other observers suggest that the more closely China becomes involved in increasingly globalised scientific collaboration networks, the more its researchers will, of their own accord, strive to adhere to international standards. And this trend will only be furthered by the huge numbers of Chinese academics being trained abroad, they add.
William Kirby, Chang professor of China studies at Harvard University, says that “any place where there is enormous pressure to publish – and that is certainly true in China…[imposes] pressures for people to bend professional norms. So that is a worry, but I don’t think that is a particularly significant worry in the long run because of the growing strength of professional oversight…and because of the strength of international standards.”
He says this should apply to any concerns about ethical standards, too. Such concerns were raised by the case of He Jiankui, who sparked an international outcry last November after using the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology in human embryos to create the world’s first “gene edited” babies. Chinese state media said that he had deliberately evaded ethical oversight in pursuit of fame and fortune, and he was fired from his position as associate professor at Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech). The Chinese government also announced a temporary halt to all research involving human gene editing.
Responding to this case, Oransky says there is a “risk in pointing to China as the problem child” regarding research ethics when there have been plenty of instances of ethical lines being crossed elsewhere, in pursuit of headline-grabbing findings. “I see enough big splashy stories like that coming out of other countries to kind of wonder whether this is singular,” he says.
Western concern about Chinese research misconduct is intensified by a degree of bias. Such prejudice is hard to prove, but there are some suggestions, for instance, that China’s true research prowess is actually underestimated owing to its researchers being held to a higher standard than everyone else by Western editors, reviewers and other authors deciding who to cite.
Speaking recently about the release of a report on artificial intelligence research, for instance, Maria de Kleijn-Lloyd, senior vice-president of analytics services at Elsevier, said that Chinese researchers sometimes raise concerns that the “relative isolation” of their AI research is in part a consequence of their work not “being recognised in the West”.
“So on my list for further research, I would like to know who cites who. Are Chinese researchers being cited primarily by other Chinese researchers or by researchers in the US, Europe or wherever?” de Kleijn-Lloyd asks.
Chinese research quality: a mixed picture
No doubt citation patterns will alter of their own accord if and when China does take over as global research’s centre of gravity, and commands the esteem that goes with that. But that seems likely to happen much more quickly in some disciplines than in others, given China’s major concentration on science and, in particular, fields such as engineering, computer science and biotechnology.
Indeed, some observers fear that this vast mass of research in science, technology, engineering and mathematics could have a gravitational effect on the whole of global research, drawing it away from the humanities and social sciences. But Harvard’s Kirby says that while it is true that China has concentrated a huge amount of resources in areas such as applied science, “it is actually not that different to what is happening in universities in the West”, where there has been “a gradual but very steady and accelerating trend” for these fields to receive more funding.
At the same time, says Marijk van der Wende, distinguished professor of higher education at Utrecht University, China is “well aware” that some of the skills that come from studying other subjects, such as creativity and critical thinking, are vital to its development as a higher education power. “China knows that it has to become more creative and that innovation does take more than STEM alone,” she says.
Her own work has also shown that even in STEM, Chinese experts are critical about the extent to which China has been able to foster a “real culture of excellence”, in which research is driven by “intrinsic motivation and scientific curiosity, rather than external, material or short-term performance drivers, such as compensation for articles”.
There are “explicit examples in the world of how you [rectify] this by granting the top researchers a free environment to enquire”, van der Wende says. Such research independence in the humanities and social sciences as well as STEM would also help to foster interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation, another great basis for innovation, she says.
The difficulty is that, politically, China seems to be moving in the opposite direction, discouraging autonomy and free thought. This is shown by developments in parts of the system that have traditionally had more research independence, such as Hong Kong, where the Communist Party of China appears to be tightening control over research and university governance.
Kirby adds that if he “were to think of two words that summarise the challenge Chinese universities have in becoming leaders in the [research] world, those two words are ‘the party’, which is much more interested in control than in creativity”.
“Under [President] Xi Jinping the role of the party has got stronger and stronger in every type of institution, but particularly in institutions of learning,” he says. “If this were to continue, it would be a permanent limitation on the capacity of Chinese universities to lead.”
However, Kirby says that China still has the potential to have a hugely positive impact on global research, in the same way that US universities did at the beginning of the 20th century. “The rise of another great centre of higher education and of research is a good thing and hopefully will lead to greater collaboration across borders and healthy competition,” he says.
He adds that much depends on how the US and Europe react – or don’t – to China’s emergence. The US’ current status as the go-to place for research collaborations, for instance, could be lost more quickly if the country continues to cut resources for public higher education.
“American taxpayers have been encouraged by their politicians to be penny wise and pound foolish: not to invest in the education of their children, not to invest in the basic research that has been the engine of innovation in higher education and industry,” he says.
A project being led by Utrecht is examining China’s massive Belt and Road investment initiative across Asia, Africa and eastern Europe, and what it will mean for global higher education; van der Wende suggests that, in light of its current trade conflict with the US, China may prefer to work with the European Union.
Futao Huang, a professor at Hiroshima University’s Research Institute for Higher Education, points out that China modelled its modern higher education and research systems on those of continental Europe: “Both China and the main EU countries share more similarities in higher education and science research than China does with either the UK or the US,” he says.
The direction and extent of collaboration between China and the West may also depend on whether levels of trust can be maintained around the development of technology. Recent tensions over Western partnerships with the Chinese technology company Huawei saw the University of Oxford announce that it will not accept any new research contracts with the firm, which is suspected to have links with the Chinese state.
Huang postulates that there could be less international collaboration “in some sensitive fields, such as information technology, space technology, AI, genetics and those fields that might [have relevance to the] military and defence…This is especially true in the case of the US.”
So, irrespective of whether Chinese research deals with its issues concerning academic misconduct, misplaced incentives and disciplinary narrowness, its future position in the global research order may remain hostage to international political currents, over which universities have little influence.
But van der Wende suggests that Chinese researchers’ ability to weather the political storms and remain interconnected with the global scientific ecosystem may be the single most important determining factor in whether it can rise to the top.
“In order to thrive in scientific research, China will have to remain open. You can’t order science [to happen]: it is a global affair and it is global enterprise,” she says. “Collaboration will have to remain a key element of China’s strategy. Even with its size, it will not get very far if it cuts itself off again.”
Publicație : The Times
Concorso rifatto per l’astrofisica del team di „Rosetta”. Prima esclusa, ora vince
L’ateneo di Padova ritorna sui suoi passi, dopo il ricorso al Tar. Non era stata valutata la sua „attività sul campo”. Diventa professore associato
ROMA – La scienziata delle stelle, e ancor più delle comete, no. Non poteva essere fatta fuori da una commissione disattenta alle sue trentatré pagine di curriculum e indifferente alle decisive missioni spaziali a cui ha partecipato (o che ha coordinato). È bastato un ricorso al Tar del Veneto – vinto facile – per rifare quel concorso da professore associato al Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia (si chiama „Galileo Galilei” il dipartimento) dell’Università di Padova e consegnare la cattedra a chi aveva contribuito a guidare – dall’Italia, anche da Padova – la sonda Rosetta: dodici anni nello spazio e un contributo di scoperte che stanno cambiando il nostro approccio allo studio delle comete.
La rapida retromarcia dell’ateneo patavino sulla scienziata Monica Lazzarin, 56 anni, dice due cose: all’Università di Padova si possono fare errori comuni a quello di molti atenei italiani – i bandi spinti verso un candidato -, ma poi si ha l’accortezza di tornare sui propri passi. Secondo, ci sono nuovi segnali di attenzione e resistenza dei rettori italiani nei confronti dei pilotaggi concorsuali realizzati dai singoli dipartimenti: sempre più spesso i „magnifici” accolgono gli inviti a controllare i bandi, annullano graduatorie, rifanno concorsi.
La ricercatrice Monica Lazzarin, dopo una vita interstellare – quale membro, tra l’altro, della commissione Nasa postdoctoral program e partecipante a numerose missioni dell’Agenzia spaziale europea – dallo scorso 1 febbraio può insegnare „Astrofisica del sistema solare” ai suoi studenti di Padova. Sì, nel concorso del marzo 2017 i tre membri della commissione giudicante l’avevano chiaramente sfavorita – lo dirà un Tribunale amministrativo regionale quattordici mesi dopo – consentendo a uno dei due candidati vincitori di presentare due pubblicazioni scritte insieme a due commissari. Gli arbitri universitari, ha sentenziato il Tar, avrebbero usato un „eccesso di potere” nell’attribuire a una seconda candidata vincitrice un ruolo di guida in una ricerca anche se mai era stata „principal investigator” (primo responsabile scientifico). Al contrario della Lazzarin. Il giudizio „eccellente” calato sulla vincitrice, poi, si scontrava con il solo „ottimo” della candidata sconfitta e ricorrente.
Nella sentenza del Tar colpisce il quarto punto preso in analisi dai giudici amministrativi: la non attribuzione di punteggio per la Missione Rosetta. Hanno scritto i giudici (siamo nel maggio 2018): „La mancata valutazione dell’attività svolta nell’ambito della missione dell’Agenzia spaziale europea” vizia il processo valutativo „per eccesso di potere dovuto alla mancata valutazione di elementi istruttori”. In altri passaggi i giudici parlano di „affermazioni prive di riferimenti oggettivi che, nel loro complesso, non contengono un raffronto effettivo tra le posizioni dei candidati”. La commissione non aveva preso in considerazione, per continuare, „le attività di osservazione spaziale poste in essere nel corso degli anni” richiamandole „in modo generico e indifferenziato”: la ricorrente, la Lazzarin appunto, ne aveva effettuate quarantaquattro in varie zone del mondo, uno dei due vincitori ne aveva invece dichiarato solo sedici. Monica Lazzarin, ancora, era stata relatrice di tesi in ventotto occasioni (contro tre della vincitrice).
Dopo la sentenza del Tar del Veneto favorevole alla co-coordinator di Rosetta, l’Università di Padova ha istituito una nuova commissione al Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, ha fissato il nuovo concorso e lo scorso 31 gennaio il rettore Rosario Rizzuto ha pubblicato il decreto di nomina dell’astrofisica Monica Lazzarin a professore di seconda fascia (51 mila euro lordi l’anno per tredici mensilità). Si è insediata il giorno dopo. Esce dalla graduatoria il vincitore maschio, resta dentro la collega, ora seconda. Plaude l’Associazione „Trasparenza e merito”, a cui la Lazzarin è iscritta. Ma i ricorsi non si fermano.
Publicație : La Repubblica