8 școli de vară la UAIC
Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” din Iași va avea 8 scoli de vara. Este vorba despre un proiect finantat integral de Banca Mondiala, program care are ca scop desfășurarea de cursuri și alte activități relevante destinate elevilor de liceu.
Programele se adreseaza mai ales liceenilor dezavantajați social, pentru încurajarea finalizării studiilor liceale și facilitarea continuării educației la nivel terțiar.
Liceeni care pot accesa proiectul de vara de la UAIC Iasi sunt mai ales cei care trec in clasa a XII a.
De la „Vreau să fiu student la Litere! pana la „Vacanță juridică DREPT în Iași” sau „Descoperim Pământul spre culmile cunoaşterii!”, toate cele 8 proiecte se adreseaza unui numar de peste 1 100 de elevi ce vor participa la ateliere de lucru, vizite de studiu, competiții sportive, evenimente culturale, activități legate de viața universitară și domeniile de studiu ale facultăților implicate.
Publicație : Tele M și Bună Ziua Iași
Idei despre Europa premiate cu bani
Universitatea „Al.I. Cuza“ pune la dispoziţia studenţilor oportunitatea de a câştiga premii în bani prin participarea la două concursuri, de postere şi de eseuri pe teme europene. Competiţia este dedicată, conform organizatorilor, acelor studenţi care sunt interesaţi de dezbaterile legate de Uniunea Europeană, „care doresc să expună şi să argumenteze viziunea proprie referitoare la procesul de integrare europeană sau să propună un proiect al Europei de mâine“.
Pe lângă cele două competiţii există şi o sesiune naţională de comunicări ştiinţifice studenţeşti în domeniul studiilor europene la care tinerii se pot înscrie. Astfel, la cele trei evenimente, tinerii pot depune fie o lucrare ştiinţifică, fie un eseu argumentativ sau un poster despre subiectele importante aflate pe agenda europeană, precum alegerile din mai sau BREXIT, ce fel de Europă îşi doresc tinerii şi care sunt oportunităţile pe car ele au, dar şi care sunt constrângerile oferite de spaţiul european, ce provocări apar în contextul noilor realităţi economice şi sociale, cum se regăsesc tinerii în modelul european etc. Participanţii se pot înregistra până pe 22 aprilie, iar în perioada 9-10 mai vor fi prezentate lucrările.
Publicație : Ziarul de Iași
Primul student asasinat de comunişti va fi comemorat mâine
La Iaşi va fi comemorat vineri primul student victimă a unui asasinat politic comunist. Sergiu Iacovlov a fost ucis în curtea Policlinicii din boltă, de pe strada Independenţei, în 1946, după ce se erijase ca un lider studenţesc care nu agrea creşterea mişcării comuniste
Evenimentul este organizat de istoricii Mihai Dorin şi Dănuţ Doboş de la Episcopia Romano-Catolică din Iaşi, cât şi de Societatea Studenţilor Medicinişti de la UMF Iaşi, fiindcă Iacovlov era student la Facultatea de Medicină, care aparţinea la momentul respectiv de Universitatea „Al.I. Cuza“ – „Cuza-Vodă“ după denumirea de la momentul respectiv. Locul de pe Independenţei unde va avea loc vineri, de la ora 13, slujba de comemorare, era la momentul respectiv Spitalul asigurărilor sociale, iar istoricii descriu că a fost un caz ce a avut o reverberaţie semnificativă în epocă. „A provocat manifestări de solidaritate, atacuri ale comuniştilor, sfâşierea Senatului universităţii în două tabere: susţinătorii autonomiei universitare pe de o parte şi pe cei ai comunizării universităţii pe de altă parte. Acest asasinat a dus la separarea apelor şi a început îndepărtarea profesorilor democraţi care nu s-au situat de partea comuniştilor, după cum putem găsi date în arhivele universităţii“, a declarat istoricul Mihai Dorin. Acesta este considerat a fi primul asasinat politic din rândul tineretului studenţesc de la Iaşi.
Publicație : Ziarul de Iași
Proiecte europene de sute de milioane, la UMF
Iaşul ar urma să aibă cel mai modern Centru de Simulare din ţară
Prof.dr. Viorel Scripcariu, rectorul Universităţii de Medicină şi Farmacie, şi Vasile Asandei, director general al Agenţiei pentru Dezvoltare Regională Nord-Est, au semnat ieri la sediul UMF Iaşi contractul de finanţare pentru proiectul „Recompartimentarea, modernizarea spaţiilor de învăţământ, cu păstrarea funcţionalului existent“ destinat clădirii „Nicolae Leon“ a UMF Iaşi.
Aceasta este noua denumire a fostului sediu UPA din Iaşi, turnul de 13 etaje cumpărat de UMF. Valoarea totală a proiectului este de 26.185.298 lei, din care 25.819.447,55 sunt cheltuieli eligibile. Clădirea, în care UMF a progresat semnificativ cu lucrările, va avea o capacitate de 1.833 de studenţi, va fi destinată Facultăţii de Medicină Generală, existând posibilitatea ca unele discipline să fie mutate complet acolo, şi a fost modernizată, urmând a fi dată în folosinţă la începutul anului universitar 2019-2020. La aceeaşi conferinţă de presă, rectorul a prezentat şi activitatea depunerii de proiecte pe ultimii trei ani de la universitate. Spre exemplu, fiindcă liniile de finanţare au fost închise sau limitate, în 2017 s-au depus proiecte pentru suma de circa 17,7 milioane de lei, în timp ce în 2018 au existat depuse proiecte pentru suma totală de aproximativ 147 milioane de lei, pe toate resursele de finanţare, atât naţionale, cât şi internaţionale.
Unul dintre cele mai interesante astfel de proiecte este Centrul de Simulare la care lucrează deja universitatea, din fonduri proprii, pentru care a fost depus deja un proiect aflat în evaluare pe o linie europeană de finanţare, de circa 30 milioane de lei, care se doreşte a fi unul dintre cele mai moderne din ţară şi care va fi amplasat pe strada Mihail Kogălniceanu. Acolo vor exista, conform rectorului, mai multe categorii de activităţi, precum simulări pe manechine sau chiar prin tehnica realităţii virtuale.
Publicație : Ziarul de Iași și Bună Ziua Iași
In lumina reflectoarelor Studioul BZI LIVE a fost programata o editie despre o PREMIERA in CERCETAREA romaneasca
Miercuri, 20 martie 2019, incepand cu ora 15.00 in lumina reflectoarelor Studioul BZI LIVE a fost programata o editie speciala pentru intreaga comunitate locala dar si un exemplu pentru intreaga Romanie • Invitati la o emisiune – dialog au fost invitati cercetatorii stiintifici dr. Andrei Asandulesei – noul coordonator al celei mai moderne Platforme de cercetare stiintifica interdisciplinara pe zona Arheologiei din tara respectiv ArheoInvest si dr. Sorin Tascu – coordonator al proiectului Centrului RAMTECH (Research Center on Advanced Materials and Technologies) ce are drept scop extinderea competitivitatii, prin crearea unui grup de experti de inalt nivel stiintific focalizat pe domenii de cercetare care pana acum nu au fost abordate teoretic si experimental • Alaturi de acestia au fost abordate aspecte ce tin de CERCETAREA romaneasca, munca pe care o realizeaza alaturi de echipele pe care le coordoneaza • De precizat ca invitatii fac parte din nucleul de viitor promovat de Universitatea Alexandru Ioan Cuza – UAIC din Iasi pe segmentul esential al Inovatiei si Cercetarii din tara noastra • Emisiunea completa cu cei doi universitari poate fi urmarita AICI:
Pe 20 martie 2019, incepand cu ora 15.00 in lumina reflectoarelor Studioul BZI LIVE a fost programata o editie speciala pentru intreaga comunitate locala dar si un exemplu pentru intreaga Romanie. Invitati la o emisiune – dialog au fost invitati cercetatorii stiintifici dr. Andrei Asandulesei – noul coordonator al celei mai moderne Platforme de cercetare stiintifica interdisciplinara pe zona Arheologiei din tara respectiv ArheoInvest si dr. Sorin Tascu – coordonator al proiectului Centrului RAMTECH (Research Center on Advanced Materials and Technologies) ce are drept scop extinderea competitivitatii, prin crearea unui grup de experti de inalt nivel stiintific focalizat pe domenii de cercetare care pana acum nu au fost abordate teoretic si experimental. Alaturi de acestia au fost abordate aspecte ce tin de CERCETAREA romaneasca, munca pe care o realizeaza alaturi de echipele pe care le coordoneaza.
De precizat ca invitatii fac parte din nucleul de viitor promovat de Universitatea Alexandru Ioan Cuza – UAIC din Iasi pe segmentul esential al Inovatiei si Cercetarii din tara noastra. De reliefat ca ei fac parte dintr-un proiect, in premiera nationala, ce implica realizarea unui Institut de Cercetare la Cuza ce are drept scop o mai buna eficientizare a colaborarii stiintifice.
De asemenea, cercetatorii de la Cuza au vorbit de ceea ce inseamna pasiune, munca, atragerea de tineri care sa activeze in domeniile pe care le coordoneaza inclusiv din strainatate. Peste toate acestea, au punctat faptul ca UAIC dispune de infrastructura de ultima ora, comparabila cu cea din strainatate, atat pentru domeniul Arheologie dar si pe Fizica. Emisiunea completa cu cei doi universitari poate fi urmarita AICI:
Publicație : Bună Ziua Iași
Universitatea Tehnica din Iasi a obtinut peste 500.000 de euro de la Banca Mondiala, ca finantare pentru sase din cele noua programe depuse pe axa ROSE
Universitatea Tehnica (TUIASI) „Gheorghe Asachi” din Iasi a obtinut peste 500.000 de euro de la Banca Mondiala, ca finantare pentru sase din cele noua programe depuse pe axa ROSE, program complex prin care se doreste, la nivelul întregii tari, scaderea nivelului abandonului universitar si sprijinirea studentilor din medii defavorizate sa acceada în învatamântul superior si sa finalizeze facultatea.
Prof. univ. dr. ing. Neculai Seghedin, prorectorul institutiei, responsabil cu activitatea didactica, a precizat ca exista trei componente ale proiectelor ROSE, sprijinite de Banca Mondiala.
Pâna acum, la TUIASI au fost implementate cele (proiectele- n.r.) tip centre de învatare, fiind inaugurat un astfel de centru ultra-modern anul trecut – „Remedium„. Mai exista deja în implementare si proiectele necompetitive, obtinute pe baza depunerii de proiecte care respecta o serie de cerinte tehnice, destinate activitatilor remediale si de dezvoltare personala pentru studentii de anul I. Universitatea desfasoara trei astfel de proiecte, iar pâna la 1 aprilie 2019 se vor depune propuneri astfel încât sa functioneze câte unul la nivelul fiecarei facultati a TUIASI.
În ceea ce priveste cele sase proiecte câstigate în urma competitiei din martie 2019, acestea vizeaza organizarea de scoli de vara pentru elevii de la anumite licee identificate de unitatea de management a proiectelor ROSE la nivel national, în special cele din mediile defavorizate.
„Elevii vor veni în timpul verii la universitati si vor desfasura diverse actiuni în facultati, în Universitate, dar si în Iasi si în afara orasului, fiind prevazute si vizite de studii în diverse obiective industriale din domeniul specific de activitate al facultatilor. Se au în vedere diverse actiuni care sa arate elevilor care sunt particularitatile fiecarei facultati în parte, ca elevii sa aiba o imagine asupra felului în care ar putea sa ia o decizie cu privire la intrarea lor într-o facultate sau nu”, a declarat prof. univ. dr. ing. Neculai Seghedin.
Perioada în care se vor desfasura aceste scoli de vara este de doua – trei saptamâni, programata pentru luna iulie 2019, grupele fiind alcatuite din circa 25 de elevi, una, maximum doua pentru fiecare facultate careia i s-a aprobat si finantat desfasurarea unui astfel de proiect.
„Proiectele se vor suprapune cu perioada Admiterii, astfel ca elevii vor avea sansa de a vedea cum se desfasoara activitati de acest gen coordonate si de studenti. Vor fi cazati în Campus, vor mânca la cantina, vor participa la evenimente sportive în Campus, dar si la activitati de Educatie în Centrul de învatare «Remedium», iar ulterior la facultati”, a completat prof. univ. dr. ing. Neculai Seghedin.
Publicație : Bună Ziua Iași
Jordan Peterson: Controversial philosopher claims Cambridge University buckled to ‘political correctness types’
Author and academic was due to research religion later this year
Jordan Peterson, the Canadian academic whose fellowship with the University of Cambridge has been abruptly withdrawn, claims he has fallen foul of the “diversity, equity and inclusivity mob”.
The 56-year-old author and professor of psychology, who has styled himself as an opponent of so-called political correctness, had been due to take up the fellowship later this year to do research on religion.
On Wednesday, the university confirmed the fellowship from the department of divinity had been withdrawn. It declined to say when the decision had been taken or why.
r Peterson said he had not officially informed of the university’s move, or its reasoning.
Yet, he told The Independent he believed it was because he did not appeal to the “diversity, equity and inclusivity mob” at the institution – “the political correctness types”.
Mr Peterson, whose books include Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief and 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, informed his nearly two million subscribers on YouTube on Monday evening that, having recently returned from a tour of Australia and New Zealand, he would be taking up a fellowship at Cambridge in the autumn.
“In October I am going to Cambridge University in the UK for two months and I will be a visiting fellow there at the divinity school and should give me the opportunity to talk to religious experts of all types for a couple of months, as well as students,” he said.
On Wednesday, the department of divinity tweeted that the fellowship had been withdrawn. The university declined to explain the decision. A spokesperson said in a statement: “We can confirm that Jordan Peterson requested a visiting fellowship, and an initial offer has been rescinded after a further review.”
Cambridge University Students Union said it was pleased by the decision, telling Varsity: “His work and views are not representative of the student body and as such we do not see his visit as a valuable contribution to the university, but one that works in opposition to the principles of the university.”
Mr Peterson, who last year had a controversial interview with Channel 4 News presenter Cathy Newman wherein Newman challenged him over some of views on women, including referring to some as “crazy, harpy sisters”, said the university had lost out on a chance for him present a series of lectures on the Biblical book of Genesis.
He said he suspected the department of divinity was attempting to capitalise on its “virtue signalling”.
“It’s not going to stop me. I will do them in Canada or somewhere,” he said. “It’s not that I am going to be unable to occupy myself in October and November.”
He said he believed the students’ union was among those who had been protesting the fellowship, hence its “gleeful reaction” to the decision.
Asked if the problem was not his association with culture war topics such as masculinity and gender pay gaps, rather than his standing as an authority on religion, he said: “I’m better known for that only if you read newspaper article headlines, not by people who actually follow what I have done.”
Asked about the students who had opposed the fellowship, he said: “They don’t know anything about me.”
Among faculty and alumni, the decision to withdraw the fellowship received a mixed reaction. Conservative writer Toby Young tweeted: “Cambridge University Students’ Union says “his work and views are not representative of the student body”. Isn’t that the point, you numbskulls?”
Priyamvada Gopal, who teaches in the university’s English department, responded with sarcasm.
“The truth is Cambridge just doesn’t have enough sage authoritative white men who believe they know better than everyone else and can tell the world how to run itself,” she said. “We need to ship them in from outside.”
Publicație : The Independent și The Guardian
Students occupy Goldsmiths in protest at institutional racism
Campaigners say university failed to respond adequately to racist abuse of student elections candidate
Students have occupied a key building at Goldsmiths, part of the University of London, demanding an institution-wide strategy to tackle racism which they say is undermining the experiences of black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) students.
Protesters belonging to Goldsmiths Anti-Racist Action began their occupation of Deptford town hall more than a week ago, after a candidate in the student elections complained she had been subjected to racist abuse.
She reported to university authorities that her election poster had been scrawled over with racist graffiti mocking her accent and her banner removed, but protesters have accused the university of responding inadequately.
Anger over the incident has fuelled long-standing concerns among the protesters about the experience of BAME students at Goldsmiths, who make up 40% of the student population.
The student union welfare and liberation officer, Mona Mounir, said: “From harassment in classrooms to a lack of mental health provision, a Eurocentric curriculum and an outrageous BAME attainment gap, every day students and staff of colour experience interpersonal and institutional racism.
“This university has not provided enough support, far from it. We have had enough; our occupation is a necessary last resort in the face of an institution that does not take racism seriously.”
Campaigners say many of the issues raised will chime with student experiences elsewhere in the higher education sector, where the dropout rate among BAME students is higher and academic outcomes lower than among their white peers.
In 2017-18, figures for Goldsmiths show 71.6% of BAME undergraduates received either a first class or upper second degree, compared to 89.7% of white undergraduates in the same year.
Last month the university appointed Dr Nicola Rollock as Goldsmiths’ academic lead to address discrepancies in the experience and outcomes of BAME students compared to their white peers. Protesters argue, however, she has not been given enough time or resources to address the scale of the problem.
They have drawn up a manifesto demanding “an institution-wide strategic plan on how the university plans to tackle racism and the realities of life as a BAME student at Goldsmiths”, including changes to the complaints procedures which they regard as largely ineffective and inaccessible to BAME students.
They have also called for mandatory training for all student-facing staff on issues of diversity and race awareness. Goldsmiths has since pledged to start rolling out such training from the start of the next academic year in September 2019.
On Wednesday, the ninth day of the occupation, the protest at Deptford town hall is still going strong. Banners are strung up on the outside of the prestigious Grade II-listed building informing passersby about the anti-racist occupation and students armed with a megaphone shouted out their demands.
The university denies claims from the protesters that it has been heavy-handed in its response to the occupation and says it has already conceded to a number of the protesters’ requests.
In a letter to students taking part in the occupation, the registrar and secretary, Helen Watson, wrote: “With around 40% of our students identifying as black, Asian or ethnic minority, Goldsmiths is proud of our diverse and inclusive community and prejudice of any kind has no place on our campus.
“Any reports of racism or any other discriminatory behaviour are triaged rapidly and, where appropriate, referred to the police. We also actively encourage any victim of such crime to report incidents directly to the police.”
The university has committed to working with the students’ union to review Goldsmiths’ hate crime reporting processes. As well as mandatory staff training on race awareness, the university said it had also agreed to a major additional investment in student wellbeing services.
A university spokesperson told the Guardian: “We recognise that there is more work to do in this area, but we hope these steps demonstrate our commitment to improving the experiences and outcomes of our BAME students.”
Kehinde Andrews, professor of black studies at Birmingham City University, said: “Universities have a terrible track record of dealing with student experiences of racism. Sometimes it seems like the institutions are set up to mishandle these kinds of issues, with the burden of proof being on the victim to prove that their abuse was racist.
“This should come as no surprise given the history of universities or the realities that the leadership, and those who write the policies are almost exclusively white. I’ve had too many experiences of trying to explain how something is racist that I have almost given up trying, and can see why so many people get frustrated.”
Publicație : The Guardian
Open University forced to cancel conference following threats from the transgender lobby
The Open University was forced to cancel a conference on prison reform following threats from the transgender lobby, it has emerged.
Over a hundred delegates had already bought tickets for the two-day event in May, which was co-organised by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (CCJS). But earlier this month, attendees and speakers were notified that the conference had been called off.
The CCJS, an educational charity, has been accused of “transphobia” for its stance that transgender female prisoners should be incarcerated separately from female prisoners.
“The Open University faced quite significant pressure from transgender activists. They received a number of emails where some of the language was extraordinarily overheated,” a source told The Telegraph.
“They were effectively being threatened with demonstrations and disruptive activity, possibly in the conference hall itself, and some kind of picket line or protest outside the conference.”
Last month, the CCJS released a statement on transgender prisoners which said that prison service has “a duty to provide fair, decent and respectful provision for trans prisoners”.
It went on: “Given the current state of the prison system, in the case of trans women prisoners, we consider that this can best be achieved through the provision of accommodation that is separate from female prisoners.”
The CCJS statement was released following the case of transgender prisoner Karen White, a convicted rapist and paedophile who was born a man but used a transgender persona to attack female prisoners in a women’s prison.The prison service has since apologised over failings in the case.
The organisation came under attack from transgender activists who claimed that their recommendations support “state-sanctioned murder”, a reference to the cases of transgender prisoners in male prisons who have committed suicide.
After the conference was announced, it is understood that activists who had targeted CCJS turned their gaze to Open University by threatening to disrupt the event.
The higher education watchdog, the Office for Students, can intervene if there were a pattern of cases where there was evidence of a failure of governance on freedom of speech.
The CCJS said in a statement: “We are saddened to announce that the conference, Prison Abolition in the UK, planned for 23 and 24 May, has been cancelled.
“Unfortunately, one of our conference partners has, in recent weeks, been subjected to concerted pressure by those intent on disrupting the conference. In the circumstances, they felt they had no option but to pull out.”
The organisation added that the circumstances that led to the cancellation of the conference highlight “the deep need for a movement grounded in inclusive, respectful dialogue”.
Meanwhile a spokesman for The Open University said it cancelled the conference due to concerns that discussion “was moving away from its main, originally intended, focus – to debate the past, present and future of prison abolition”.
Dr Jane Hamlin, president of The Beaumont Society, a transgender support group, said that the experience of trans prisoners is varied.
“Some people accept the conditions they are in, possibly because they are not receiving abuse. Others have a dismal time because they receive abuse and sometimes violence,” she said.
“Clearly it’s a tricky situation. But we hope that where trans people want to get on and serve their sentence, they can be in suitable accommodation. If that’s a trans woman who doesn’t have a history of violence then they should be in the women’s estate.”
Publicație : The Telegraph
UK academics should not rely on their universities to save them from Brexit fallout
For those reliant on EU funding, seeking appointments at continental universities is the only sensible course, says Peter Coveney
Given the jaw-dropping lack of accountability that the UK government and its prime minister have shown to the entire nation over the Brexit process, it is clear that it is now a question of every person for themselves in terms of salvaging what we can of our own livelihoods and the UK’s intellectual and economic vibrancy.
That is why, at the beginning of this month, I took up a professorship in applied high performance computing at the University of Amsterdam. I will keep my chair in physical chemistry at UCL, as well as my directorship of its centre for computational science, but I will now split my time between the UK and the Netherlands.
Domestic funding for some of the areas I work in has dwindled over recent years, but I have hugely benefited from participation in several major research projects funded by the European Union. These have been run at a scale that is typically well beyond UK funding agencies, involving well-funded research dissemination and management of a kind that national agencies have been slow to replicate. The accompanying international recognition has opened many doors to new opportunities, which have taught me new and different ways to do things.
Involvement with multidisciplinary teams of talented colleagues from across the continent particularly suits people like me, for whom domain boundaries merely represent obstacles to intellectual progress. But as soon as the chaotic and foolish decision to trigger Article 50 was taken, I saw the writing on the wall. Pessimistic about the government’s commitment and ability to promptly negotiate continuing affiliation to EU research programmes, I decided 14 months ago to take matters into my own hands.
I expect the UK to take a decade or more to recover from the folly of withdrawing from the EU, as opposed to seeking to lead it. And I have no intention of remaining holed up in a regime of limited funding that has increasingly been driven by economic imperatives but – despite many claims to the contrary – has never found a modus operandi for working with industry.
I am the coordinator (leader) of a couple of multimillion-euro EU projects, one with eight co-investigators and the other with 14. While the UK government has committed to underwriting the funding of UK co-investigators in such projects, no similar guarantee has been extended to me as their coordinator, as if scientific leadership is less of a concern. This is a problem since legal advice suggests that if a coordinator is from a third country, as the UK would be in a no-deal Brexit, that country might be expected to fund the entire project. Hence, my doing nothing would put all participants’ research and some livelihoods at risk. It is a risk that I am not prepared to run.
The UK could have been a central player in the development of supercomputing to enable bigger, better and faster science, via a new EU initiative called EuroHPC. I do not now expect UK-based researchers to play any significant role, and all the research and development that has already been conducted will be lost to them. But my Amsterdam chair – which has arisen out of my own efforts to build on my European relationships – will at least allow me personally to remain involved. All in all, this is plainly the only sensible course for me to have embarked on.
In the past few months, we have read about new initiatives that UK universities have been undertaking to allow their academics, in principle, to continue participating in EU funding through institution-wide affiliation with universities within the EU. But I am not sure at present what they have to show for it: the coming months and years will reveal what such initiatives actually amount to.
In November, UCL responded to decisions by the UK’s “big three” of Imperial College London and the universities of Cambridge and Oxford to establish tie-ups with, respectively, the Technical University of Munich, LMU Munich and four Berlin universities by announcing a plan to establish partnerships with a set of continental institutions. These include (bafflingly) the entire Max Planck Society. They also include two institutions in the Netherlands. Not Amsterdam, but I am pleased to say that UCL has encouraged me to develop these links anyway. And, wherever I turn, colleagues tell me that I have made a smart move.
Should they follow my lead? My own experience tells me that it is more effective to act alone because coordination at the institutional level is often slow and cumbersome, and not targeted towards meeting immediate needs. Those colleagues that don’t make their own arrangements are certainly taking a chance.
The way I see it, the new opportunities that will be afforded to me by my position in the Netherlands are one of the few positive outcomes from the shambles of Brexit. I expect to spend a significant amount of time in Amsterdam, enjoying the fresh air and safe haven from the draining uncertainty that currently pervades the UK.
Publicație : The Times
How do neighbouring universities assert their identity?
Can sharing a city with a more prestigious neighbour make it easier or harder for an institution to realise its value? Jack Grove examines the competition
It’s almost two hours into the game at what is reputedly the world’s oldest ice hockey arena, but raucous student fans show no signs of quietening down. As the overtime clock in Northeastern University’s game against Boston University begins, hundreds of Northeastern Huskies fans high up in the cheap seats launch into yet another singalong to a blaring pop track. Many diehards also ignore the 4,666-seat Matthews Arena’s chilly temperature and remove their shirts.
Even in a city as sports-mad as Boston, Northeastern’s passionate ice hockey fans are widely recognised for the boisterous support they offer – despite the team’s less than spectacular record of success. The match against their rivals from a different branch of the city’s green subway line is just one of hundreds of fiercely fought sporting fixtures between the Boston area’s universities each year. The “big four”, in sporting terms, of Northeastern, Boston University, Boston College and Harvard University also regularly face off in basketball, soccer, baseball, lacrosse, rowing and American football, often in both men’s and women’s competitions. The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Brandeis University, Tufts University and others add to the glut of fixtures attended by the metropolitan area’s estimated 250,000 students, alumni and other older sports enthusiasts.
But tribal sporting loyalties do not stop fans from socialising with students from the other institutions, says Cameron Bracco, a first-year computer science student at Northeastern. “We all go to each other’s parties – it’s hard not to interact with other universities’ students in a town like Boston.”
The social buzz generated by these clashes is just one of the benefits of having a high number of universities located in the same town. Some argue that proximity also aids research, since near-neighbours can collaborate more easily. Others claim that large employers in need of top young talent are making multimillion-dollar calls on investing in big student towns. But how significant are these supposed benefits for universities themselves – particularly the less prestigious ones? And is there a sense in which sharing a city with a more prestigious neighbour makes it harder for an institution to move out of its shadows, to promulgate a distinct identity and assert its own value?
There are more than 50 higher education institutions in the greater Boston area, of which seven are inside the top 250 of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. Yet some academics at those institutions feel that the proximity of the mighty Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard – 4th and 6th respectively in THE ’s latest rankings – makes it harder for them to communicate their work.
“We will sometimes have some brilliant research and stories that local and national media totally ignore,” a senior medical professor at Boston University tells THE. “When we ask why, they’ll often just say: ‘We cover the Longwood Medical Arena [home to Harvard Medical School and its associated hospitals] and we don’t have enough people to cover other areas.’ ”
Competing with the slick PR operations of Harvard and MIT is tough in other respects, says another Boston University professor, again speaking on condition of anonymity. “Boston University is much more engaged with the city than other universities [in Boston are], but I’m not sure it gets enough credit for it,” he explains, referencing his institution’s community work and links to local businesses. “The existence of Harvard and MIT often means that many big players in Boston’s commercial world gravitate towards them as the ‘obvious universities’.”
Name-recognition can also be an issue for those operating in university towns, admits Philip Altbach, founding director of Boston College’s Center for International Higher Education. In Boston College’s case, the similarity of its name to that of Boston University can be problematic for those outside the state. “We are not a college and we’re not in Boston, so it is quite confusing,” he says, referring to the university’s location in the suburban city of Newton, six miles west of downtown Boston.
On the other hand, those within Massachusetts can also fail to acknowledge how renowned many of the universities within their vicinity have become. “Four of Boston’s universities have changed from being quite local institutions to [being] national and international-facing research universities. Boston College used to be the place where Irish and working-class students went if they didn’t get into Harvard – now it’s become hugely successful in its own right,” Altbach says, pointing out that just 27 per cent of 31,000 applicants were accepted last year. “Boston College graduates are central to the finance industry and rated as some of the best in the country,” he adds.
Having worked at many universities across the US, Altbach perceives some advantages to being the “only game in town” in higher education. For instance, the University of Wisconsin-Madison is both “an academic and sporting giant”, he says: “All the attention and loyalty in Wisconsin is focused on it.” Similarly, the local community around the University at Buffalo, at the western fringe of New York state, is similarly united around its flagship institution in a way that multi-institution towns are not, he adds.
Overall, however, Altbach sees Boston’s cluster of universities as overwhelmingly positive for each of them. The city’s booming biotech industry, which employs about 35,000 people, is one conspicuous example of how the concentration of superb researchers, university graduates and research-engaged hospitals translates into success for both institutions and the city more generally, he says. Last year, Boston, which has almost 1,000 employers in the field, overtook California as the US’ number one biotech hotspot, after a decade of steady expansion. The sector’s workers earn far more than most professors do, with the average wage standing at almost $139,000 (£106,000).
“Biotech is largely driven by MIT and Harvard, but Tufts and Boston University also benefit, and Boston College to some degree,” Altbach says, referring to increased opportunities for collaboration and student internships.
The panoply of cranes around Kendall subway station, at the more corporate end of MIT’s sprawling campus in Cambridge, is testament to the huge levels of private investment pouring into the city. In 2016, venture capitalists ploughed almost $3 billion into biopharma in Massachusetts alone, but wider technology firms, large and small, are also setting up in the area, enhancing what Martin Schmidt, MIT’s provost, calls “a very strong ecosystem” in the area. “Companies from all over the country want to come here because it has the density [of universities and graduates] that you need to be successful,” he explains. Google and Twitter have created a presence near MIT, as has Boeing, which will use its 100,000 square feet of lab space to develop autonomous planes.
This influx of high-tech employers is good news for the local community, providing high-skilled support roles and taxes for civic services; MIT paid $56 million in local commercial property taxes from its rental activities, making it Cambridge’s biggest single taxpayer despite its tax-exempt status.
Boston’s status as an education city also helps to attract more scholarly students to its lesser lights, many argue. Boston University’s own academic pedigree is impressive: it is where Alexander Graham Bell developed the telephone and where numerous Nobel laureates have worked; its latest graduate to make a big impact is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the high-profile 29-year-old recently elected to represent the Bronx in the House of Representatives. But current student Mercedes Munoz admits that Boston’s overall academic reputation was an important factor in drawing her 2,000 miles from her native Texas to study psychology. “I grew up in a mainly immigrant community – it was a bilingual place, where the local paper could be read by a sixth-grader,” she explains. “I wanted to go somewhere for university which was ‘academic’: where everyone in the city was held to, or aspired to, a higher standard – somewhere which would push me to do better.”
Meanwhile, Ciana Cronin, a second-year business administration student at Northeastern and a native of Arizona, welcomes the opportunity to attend lectures at other Boston institutions; her course, for instance, involves music business modules taken at the nearby Boston Conservatory at Berklee.
Parents can also feel more comfortable sending their students to a university town, observes Richard Miller, president of Olin College of Engineering, a small, highly selective college in Needham, 11 miles west of Boston: “If you’re asking parents to send their children hundreds of miles away, they want to know they are safe, in an environment that knows how to look after students,” he says.
For academics, Boston’s potential to solve academia’s “two-body problem” of finding work for academic couples is a big draw, Miller says. Studies suggest that at least one-third of US faculty have partners who are also academics – rising above 50 per cent for academic scientists. Yet dual career opportunities are often limited; Miller used to be a dean at the University of Iowa, whose staff and students represent around half of the 75,000 people living in Iowa City. “It is a superb research university, but the big problem is that there is no other employer in town. We used to say that it took 10 minutes to recruit a faculty member and three months to recruit the spouse,” he says.
This familiar scenario means that, except in the rare event that two posts at the same institution arise simultaneously, the “trailing spouse ends up compromising” and leaving academia. According to Miller, this “often means you have people who are overqualified working in jobs they don’t enjoy” – but not in Boston. Olin and other institutions use their informal connections in the city to find roles for their new hires’ partners.
Olin also benefits from the occasional desire of high-flying researchers at the larger Boston universities for a change of scene, Miller adds: “I was recently contacted by a [locally living] immunologist at Harvard, with her own National Institutes of Health grants, who said that her husband had taken a job at [nearby] Babson College and she was fed up of doing her daily commute [into Boston]. We hadn’t really thought how we’d accommodate an immunologist, but it’s opened up some really interesting areas of research for us.”
Olin, which was founded in 1997 with a $460 million endowment, has even managed to peel off some would-be MIT students seeking a more hands-on learning experience, says Miller. “Our entire leadership are MIT grads, so we know the place and love it, but it hasn’t always been the most welcoming environment for women,” he notes. Chloe Grubb, a fourth-year Olin student from New Mexico, was one of those to turn down an MIT offer. “I’d always wanted to go to MIT, but when I looked into its undergraduate programme it didn’t feel right,” she tells THE.
Another potential benefit of situating universities in close proximity to each other is the opportunity it affords for close collaboration on research projects. For instance, in the US Midwest, staff from three research-intensives from the Chicago area – Northwestern University, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago – work with colleagues from Wisconsin-Madison (just 150 miles away) at the Argonne National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary science and engineering centre outside Chicago founded in the 1940s to carry out Enrico Fermi’s work on nuclear reactors for the Manhattan Project and now run by the University of Chicago for the US Department of Energy.
“No university on its own could afford the infrastructure at Argonne – it’s just massive,” explains Chicago’s president Robert Zimmer. “Our staff also benefit from working with people from other institutions – Illinois at Chicago is, for instance, one of the world’s great engineering universities. These partnerships are increasingly important because the problems that scientists are dealing with are increasingly complex and require large-scale collaboration.”
In Boston, the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute is another such example, winning a $56 million NIH grant to support work at hospitals affiliated with Brandeis, MIT and Northeastern, as well as Tufts. “Each institution has its own personality and quite different areas of distinction, so it is this combination of talents which is important,” says Tufts provost Deborah Kochevar.
But research collaborations of this sort are infrequent, observes MIT’s Schmidt. Aside from the Broad Institute, a joint MIT-Harvard medical research centre, there is little in terms of large-scale partnerships, he says: “Research is pretty competitive, so it’s difficult when faculty [at different universities] are working in the same space to tell them to play together.”
Nor does proximity to large research-intensives necessarily confer much tangible benefit to UK universities – in research terms, at least. For instance, analysis by Alex Hulkes, strategic lead for the Economic and Social Research Council’s insights team, found that institutions within the so-called Golden Triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge – most of which are in the capital itself – do not have unexpectedly high success rates when applying for research council grants. In fact, the universities of Durham, Lancaster and York were the stand-out performers in the four years up to 2016-17.
“The data suggest that ‘only show in town’ institutions do indeed punch their weight – and in some cases punch above it,” observes Graeme Reid, professor of science and research policy at UCL. “It suggests to me that different places and institutions have distinctive strengths and the best ones play to these strengths.”
Staff at “only show in town” institutions might also be spared pangs of jealousy regarding their older, richer neighbours’ more central locations, more expensive facilities or more academically able students. But few lecturers, it seems, will admit to coveting life at a more prestigious institution. For instance, asked whether he would prefer to work at the more famous National University of Singapore, Scott Anthony, assistant professor of history at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, denies that the thought has ever crossed his mind.
“To me, it would be like saying to someone in a start-up: ‘Wouldn’t you rather work for IBM?’ ” he says. “In some ways, it would be like asking people at Imperial, the Institute of Education or [Central] St Martins whether they were jealous of Oxbridge. I suppose it’s possible, but that might suggest they were in the wrong place anyway.”
This sense of working at an institution with a distinct, alternative identity, rather than a poor imitation of a more prestigious neighbour, is crucial, according to Peter Coaldrake, who led the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) between 2003 and 2017. QUT gained its university status in 1989, some 80 years after Brisbane neighbour and Group of Eight member the University of Queensland. “We always accorded the University of Queensland great respect, as we did [nearby] Griffith University, but we focused on developing our own strengths and distinct positioning,” explains Coaldrake, citing QUT’s tagline of “a university for the real world”. “The local Queensland student market came to understand that a QUT degree in business, for example, was quite different to a commerce degree from UQ. They liked what we did and what we stood for.”
Another example of QUT’s more business-facing approach was its establishment of the world’s first creative industries faculty at the same time as it abolished its arts faculty. “For others, this might have seemed crazy-brave, but, for us, this was a straightforward decision,” Coaldrake says. “Our two local competitors were covering the so-called arts disciplines perfectly well, and we saw fairly early the potential of the creative economy and embraced these disciplines and emerging fields.”
The physical renewal of QUT’s various campuses was also deliberately distinctive, with an emphasis on creating great spaces for students. “We sought not to compete with the Gothic towers or expansive quadrangles of older and more established universities, here or elsewhere,” Coaldrake reflects. “To do so would have been a ticket to nowhere. In a sense, we managed to stay under the radar for quite a long time, but then started to really come out of the shadows.”
A long time ago, when I was 17, I decided to go to university. Living in Sydney, I chose the University of New South Wales (now UNSW Sydney). It was a very young institution at the time, having only been established in 1949, but I went there because it offered subjects that the University of Sydney did not.
The universities that bear the names of the cities of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide enjoyed about 100 years as the only universities in town. Trams had “the university” as a destination. Sure, there were other tertiary institutions – often technology- or even trade-based – but these weren’t places a toff would ever consider.
So people were very disdainful about my choice. They said to me: “Don’t go to UNSW: nobody will ever recognise a degree from there.” But both UNSW and Melbourne’s Monash University subsequently became formidable institutions, and, today, are part of the elite Group of Eight.
Meanwhile, my current state’s newest university, the University of South Australia, outperforms the neighbouring University of Adelaide – with which it came close to merging last year – on some metrics. Politicians in South Australia try to sell education as an important state commodity, but it used to irritate me to hear them continually asserting that we have three world-class universities in our town (the other being Flinders University). What we have are three universities that provide a good education for their students and have some world-leading research and some mediocre research. This is the norm. Even in my former division at the Australian National University, where I was a dean, there was one very highly productive group – and a very long tail of modest research performers.
Still, the ratio of pockets of research excellence to pockets of sloth varies, and hierarchies are a reality. One of the tragedies of modern university life is that rankings-obsessed vice-chancellors try to turn their universities into world-leading research-intensives even though the raw material they are working with will never get them there. This creates a lot of pain along the way – as Flinders, with its various rounds of job cuts, has experienced recently.
Academics are as aware as the students are of the institutional pecking order. I was also a dean at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and we never had applicants for our faculty positions from Ivy League universities. Their academics played in their own sandpit. We played in the state university sandpit. In the rest of New Jersey, there were at least a dozen or two other universities that nobody has ever heard of. They all played in their own sandpits, and very rarely did faculty cross boundaries. Faculty in those lesser-known universities had huge teaching loads and no expectations of doing research, but their students got reasonable jobs.
Many Harvard and MIT PhDs cannot get jobs at the university from which they graduated, but love the Boston lifestyle and, thus, stay in town, creating a rising research tide that raises all ships in the city. But that is possible only because Boston contains half a dozen research-intensives – so these people can stay in their sandpits without leaving the city.
The hierarchy is even more rigid in Australia, where there are old-boy networks (it is mostly boys) of doctors, lawyers and architects who would still never hire anybody from a “new” university. But then those people would never hire anyone who did not go to the right secondary school either. Hopefully those dinosaurs are dying out and that, in the new digital and professional age, skill will count for more than old school ties.
Perhaps that will also loosen university hierarchies and allow more movement of staff between institutions in university cities. That would make the institutional benefits of being located close to other universities considerably greater than they currently are.
Publicație : The Times
Grade threshold ‘exemptions for poorest’ risk Treasury rift
Post-18 education review also said to have looked at proposals to allocate top-up public funding according to subjects’ cost of provision
Plans to effectively stop students with lower grades entering higher education in England could include exemptions for disadvantaged students, while moves to lower fees could see full top-up public funding recommended, but allocated by subject area according to “cost of provision”.
Sector figures believe that both elements could feature in recommendations from the independent panel of the government’s post-18 education review.
The panel, whose report is said to have been passed by senior civil servants and gone to ministers, is expected to recommend preventing students with lower grades accessing loans for higher education courses – potentially setting the threshold at DDD A-level grades or equivalent, or a lower level.
But proposed exemptions for students from disadvantaged backgrounds with lower grades are said to have been under consideration, according to some in the sector. Exempting students from deprived areas as judged by participation of local areas (POLAR) classification – under which residential areas are broken into quintiles according to the proportion of their young people entering higher education – is thought to have been one example looked at in discussions.
Meanwhile, it is also expected that the review’s panel, led by Philip Augar, will recommend that tuition fees should be cut to £7,500 from their present level of £9,250 – but that the Treasury should fully replace the lost funding – an idea that many in the sector regard as fanciful. However, some in the sector believe that there is a plan to shift the allocation of funding: towards higher-cost science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects and away from lower-cost arts, humanities and social sciences degrees.
So while the average unit of resource could remain unchanged at £9,250 per student, that average could be allocated in a different way: with higher-cost subjects given the highest levels of direct public funding and some lower-cost subjects potentially given no top-up funding, leaving them reliant solely on fee income of £7,500 per student.
In terms of the minimum tariff threshold for loan access, the plan is likely to be supported by the Treasury, which will want to limit student numbers at universities, particularly in light of changes to the accounting treatment of student loans that will reclassify a portion of loan outlay as direct public spending.
A tariff threshold could also shift funding away from higher education towards the desperately underfunded further education sector, the likely destination for students with lower grades shut out of universities.
But the review panel is thought to be worried about the social mobility consequences of completely cutting off higher education access for low-grade students, who are more likely to come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Some in the sector speculate that, in addition to exemptions for students with lower grades from low participation areas as judged by POLAR data, exemptions could potentially be recommended for students who were entitled to free school meals, were from ethnic minority backgrounds, or were care leavers, for example.
However, the Treasury may take a different view on exemptions. Creating multiple exemptions could prevent the tariff threshold being effective as a cap on numbers.
Universities will hope that, when the government forms its response to the panel report, universities minister Chris Skidmore – who has been open in his opposition to the tariff threshold – and the Department for Education can make the idea of minimum entry standards disappear altogether.
Greg Walker, chief executive of the MillionPlus association of modern universities, said: “Two closely linked principles have underpinned admissions to higher education in the UK for decades – that universities are independent organisations that make decisions on who to admit free of government control – and that this is on the basis of ability to succeed, not the ability of prospective students to pay.
“However it might be hedged with exceptions, a grade threshold to access student loans would dismantle both of these long-held principles.”
Gordon McKenzie, chief executive of GuildHE and formerly a senior civil servant working on higher education, said that the tariff threshold plan “sounds like an idea from someone who’d never have to implement it – even without exemptions it would be complex and bureaucratic”.
He added: “Measures like POLAR and free school meals are large-scale ways of looking at disadvantage: using them to ration the chance of going to university would be bound to unfairly exclude individual, talented students.”
The review’s panel is expected to publish its report in April or May, a timescale that may be contingent on the Brexit situation.
Were the government to adopt plans to set a minimum tariff threshold for loan access and cut fees, both would require legislation in the House of Commons, where the government does not have a majority and where opponents could include Conservative MPs.
Publicație : The Times
Failed Horizon 2020 bids ‘cost European universities £6 billion’
Average success rate for European Commission programme stands at 12 per cent
Excessive waste: the EUA has put the cost of more than 130,000 unsuccessful bids at €6.8 billion
European universities and research centres have spent nearly £6 billion so far on failed bids to the Horizon 2020 funding programme, according to new analysis.
The European University Association’s latest Public Funding Observatory report, published on 21 March, puts the cost of failed applications to the European Commission programme at €6.8 billion (£5.8 billion).
The figure is based on estimates that the EUA has previously made that it costs an average of about €50,000 to submit an application to Horizon 2020.
Statistics published by the European Commission last September show that at that point it had paid out more than €33 billion on almost 20,000 successful bids to Horizon 2020, which started in 2014. But more than 130,000 bids did not win approval, giving a success rate of just 11.9 per cent.
Thomas Estermann, the EUA’s director for governance, funding and public policy development, said that although the calculation was a simplified estimate of the costs, it was a “realistic” figure in light of the complexity of proposals involving multinational research groups.
“For a serious proposal you need…time. It doesn’t work out any more that you say: ‘OK, we have a nice idea, you write it down in a couple of pages and that is it,’” he said. “You have to involve the research support services…and part of the success is that you have experienced staff who know how to write proposals.”
Mr Estermann said that one way to reduce the loss would be to enlarge the pot of money available for grants, so the success rate increased. But there also needed to be a realisation among individual countries and funders that turning to Horizon 2020 as an alternative to cuts made at the national level was contributing to the problem.
“What we see is that precisely due to reduced funding at national level, some are forced to try at European level. We are trying to communicate [that]…reducing at national level and expecting this will be replaced by European funding is, absolutely, not successful,” he said.
Mr Estermann added that it was even possible to link funding cuts at the national level to low success rates in winning grants from European Union programmes.
“There is a need to understand that actually the costs of unsuccessful proposals lie in the end with [national governments] because if it is a publicly funded system, the costs lie with the taxpayer in the end.”
He added that a number of other strategies would also help, including finding fallback ways to fund Horizon 2020 proposals that were deemed “excellent” but were unsuccessful and better “scanning” of proposals by universities before they are submitted to weed out those with a poor chance of success.
Borderline proposals that failed to gain funding were an issue for individual institutions, Mr Estermann said, “but for those that have been evaluated as excellent and didn’t get funding, there needs to be a solution either at the European level or at national level”.
“We hope these numbers…start changing perceptions. We have seen [that publishing them] is having an effect in some areas,” Mr Estermann said.
No end to austerity for universities
The EUA report reiterates warnings made in preliminary data released last year that several European countries are struggling to turn public funding for higher education around since the financial crisis.
A total of 17 systems are highlighted in the report for their falling funding from 2008 to 2017, with the gravity of the cuts depending on whether student numbers have been rising at the same time. Two systems in particular – the Republic of Ireland and Serbia – are deemed to be “in danger” because of the combination of cuts and growing student numbers.
With Ireland, which had seen some improvement more recently as funding increased, Mr Estermann pointed out that it could be argued that more could be done to reinvest in the system given recent growth in the wider economy.
“I think Ireland is very good case. The university sector there has a very big campaign to reinvest, and the ministry has said, ‘We have increased investment in the past three years.’
“That is true, but you also have to look at what happened 10 years before. [In Ireland] you could say you need to make much more effort to go back to the level of [funding there] was in 2008.”
Publicație : The Times
The ‘privileged poor’: universities are far from all inclusive
Anthony Abraham Jack’s new book distinguishes two kinds of under-represented students and sets out what universities need to do if they truly want to recruit the most disadvantaged students. Matthew Reisz writes
Anthony Abraham Jack’s new book, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, opens with his arrival at private, liberal-arts Amherst College, Massachusetts, in 2003. He had grown up in Coconut Grove, Miami, where the only white people on the streets “fell into three easily identifiable categories: police officers, crackheads, and people who had lost their way”. His privileged new classmates “swapped stories of summer fun”, including “multiweek trips abroad”, “fancy parties” and “courtside seats at professional basketball games”. Yet for him and his family, summer had merely meant “a hundred days of heat, humidity, and hurricanes”.
As this vignette suggests, The Privileged Poor is a book about social class in American higher education and the often painful culture clashes it gives rise to. But there is a twist. Between Coconut Grove and Amherst, Jack – who is now an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Business – had spent a scholarship year at a wealthy private high school in Miami called Gulliver Preparatory.
This acted, he tells Times Higher Education, like “a trailer to the full-blown movie”. He had to deal with a certain amount of racism and snobbery but was also granted “a peek behind the veil” into elite educational institutions, where teaching staff have time for close and supportive interaction with pupils. He also cultivated some rich friends to get a glimpse of the good life, and so acquired the skills to negotiate a world where most of his fellow students came from wealthier backgrounds.
After his undergraduate degree at Amherst, Jack moved on to Harvard for a master’s and PhD in sociology, which eventually led to a faculty position. What he soon discovered was that his own experience was almost entirely neglected in the academic literature. While his family was certainly poor, his time at Gulliver had transformed him into a member of the “privileged poor” referred to in his book’s title. By contrast, academic studies tended to concentrate on the group that his book describes as the “doubly disadvantaged”, who suffer severe culture shock when they go straight from a tough high school to a university full of privileged students.
“We are not paying enough attention to the diversity of experience students [from disadvantaged backgrounds] are bringing with them,” explains Jack. “To understand why they adopt certain behaviours, we have to understand their trajectories to college. We have flattened out the diversity within them.”
This represents a failure of sociological analysis. But it also has real implications for what universities need to do if they genuinely want to embrace diversity, Jack believes.
The Privileged Poor is based on a two-year project that Jack carried out for his Harvard PhD at an institution the book calls “Renowned University”, “an elite college in the northeast United States with a long history of educating academically gifted youth” (which may or may not be Harvard itself). Based on immersive research and in-depth interviews with 103 students, the book includes many striking stories of the gulf between rich and poor. Those who often had to deal with “problems at home with their family and friends – typically some combination of evictions, convictions, and violence” tended to be alienated if not disgusted by peers who bring their own interior decorators into college, boast about mid-semester trips to India for a friend’s wedding or post pictures of themselves “on their yachts with bottles of Dom Pérignon and Rolexes” on Rich Kids of the Internet.
Other encounters have a distinct element of comedy. Take the case of doubly deprived “Jose”, a young man who grew up in a poor, dangerous and largely Latino district of Los Angeles. Feeling isolated at Renowned, he was delighted to discover that someone from Mexico City had moved on to his floor at his hall of residence: “Another Mexican? We’re about to be homies!” he thought. Unfortunately, the new arrival came from a totally different class background: his father flew him out to Texas for every Dallas Cowboys home game. So there was little chance of their bonding. At the end of term, the rich kid wanted to throw out a velvet Ralph Lauren dressing gown he couldn’t be bothered to pack. Even though Jose realised that the other young man’s “balls and his dick were all over the thing”, it “felt hella good” and he was happy to take it.
The problems of the doubly disadvantaged do not end with the difficulty of bonding with their classmates. Equally significant, says Jack, is “the ‘hidden curriculum’ that hurts those for whom a college environment is new”.
This is manifested even in seemingly innocuous phrases. “A professor will come in and say ‘My office hours are from X to Y’,” he notes. “That’s a very loaded statement, using words with a lot of meaning behind them.” The upper income or privileged poor students will take up the implicit offer, come to the professor’s office, ask for favours, build contacts and so on. The doubly disadvantaged are often warier of authority figures, or remember high school teachers who were too stressed by fire-fighting to act as mentors. Many are also self-reliant, focused on “the work”, and regard it as a sign of weakness or sycophancy to seek help. As a result, they fail to use the professors as valuable resources, missing out on internships and references, as well as academic guidance.
In Jack’s view, it would be good to make clear to the doubly disadvantaged early on that even if they don’t feel as though they need help, they should drop by during “office hours”, since success at university and afterwards depends on who you know as much as what you know. Jack himself organises meetings for first-generation students, including “sessions on navigating graduate school”, but while more such proactive outreach by academics would be welcome, he believes that “they are not going to change the game. There is too much invested in the way things are, in privilege and power.”
He hopes his book will go some way towards “getting students better prepared to play the game”. Universities, meanwhile, need to do their bit to “remove the hurdles, visible and invisible, that lower-income students face”. Even terms as basic as “fellowship”, “prerequisite” and “credit” can feel bafflingly exclusionary.
What the privileged poor and doubly disadvantaged share, of course, is shortage of cash, even if they receive “no-loan financial aid”. Jack has already written in Times Higher Education about the hardship and sometimes genuine hunger caused by universities shutting down all cafeterias during spring break (“Hungry students offer food for thought for diversification efforts”, Opinion, 28 February). His book also addresses two other problematic policies.
One is the phenomenon of “community detail”, by which poor students are able to earn a little money by cleaning the rooms of their rich peers. The Privileged Poor reports ghastly stories of such students having to “pick up soiled tampons and used condoms, mop sticky floors, sweep up dead cockroaches and rats, scoop vomit from sinks, and pull out hair stuck in clogged drains”. The more arrogantly privileged may make no effort to be tidy because they know someone else will clear up after them and sometimes even berate fellow students for “missing a spot”.
On this issue, Jack takes a strong line. He would gladly see community detail abolished and replaced, for those who need the money, by “jobs that put students in contact with professors, deans and members of staff that are academically or socially enriching. I also think students can clean their own darn rooms!”
Slightly more morally complicated is a programme called Scholarship Plus, which provides students on full financial aid with five free tickets per semester to campus events. This may sound admirable, but it comes with a catch. Those paying their $15, we read, queue up for tickets at a table “next to the main entrance near the well-manicured front lawn”. Those who have “PLUSed” their tickets, by contrast, have to go to a table “next to the scuffed-up back door, which leads to an alley full of broken-down cardboard boxes”.
The Privileged Poor is a book about encouraging US universities to have “as robust conversations about social class as they do about gender and race”. Although the proportions differ, there are students of all races and genders in all of Jack’s categories for student background. Some of them clearly feel that community detail in any form and Scholarship Plus in the way it is currently organised are not only humiliating but deliberately humiliating.
Yet this also plays out rather differently on the basis of race, Jack claims. White students were sometimes upset to be “outed” as poor to people who had previously known nothing about their socio-economic background. Black and Latino students, meanwhile, “had to contend with the fact that being in that line [for Scholarship Plus tickets] underscored stereotypes that they had been fighting or experienced their entire lives – that to be black or Latino means to be poor”. Furthermore, such queues were often largely distinguished by race, and so called up discomforting echoes of “poor doors” and segregated facilities from earlier African American history. Similarly, some black students who took part in community detail were disturbed by family and wider memories of poor blacks cleaning up after rich whites.
The research that led to the book also proved disturbing to Jack himself. He found himself recalling episodes from a childhood in which “fights in the middle of the streets” and “disruptions to utilities” were far from unknown. “I was doing three or four interviews a day for days on end, and hearing those stories [from other poor, first-generation students] gets to you. You don’t just leave the interview in the office. You carry it with you. The interviews can trigger things from your own past you haven’t thought about in a decade.”
Fortunately, Jack has also had successes in lobbying Renowned University and other higher education institutions to eliminate separate queues and to ensure that food is available for students during spring break. These represent small but important steps towards his long-term goal of making “access” mean genuine “inclusion”, by “removing barriers which remind [lower-income] students they are second-class citizens in a first-class world”
Publicație : The Times
Mastère spécialisé, master of science: un an d’études en plus pour changer de vie
Après quelques années décevantes en entreprise, ils espèrent avec cette année supplémentaire en école de commerce ou d’ingénieurs une hausse de salaire, mais aussi un métier qui leur plaît, bref atteindre leurs rêves.
Sans avoir fait d’études, Céline, 35 ans, a enchaîné les petits boulots, puis, via de l’intérim, découvre le métier de gestionnaire data. «Je n’avais pas le statut de cadre, car je n’avais pas de diplôme», soupire-t-elle. On l’encourage à reprendre ses études, mais elle doit financer les 15 000 euros de la formation. Qu’importe, elle se lance, passionnée par les cours du MS manager des systèmes d’information de Grenoble EM. Résultat: embauche dans un grand groupe de luxe en tant que master data manager, avec un salaire bien supérieur. «J’ai rentabilisé ces 15 000 euros en un an et demi. Et je fais aujourd’hui un métier qui me plaît, avec des responsabilités», détaille-t-elle.
Malgré des coûts élevés, 10 000 à 20 000 euros l’année, le catalogue de mastères spécialisés des grandes écoles n’a cessé de s’étoffer ces dernières années. La Conférence des grandes écoles qui leur accorde un label en recense 380 dans tous les domaines. La raison du succès? Ces titres intéressent des profils de tous âges qui souhaitent se spécialiser, se réorienter, doper leur carrière, et bien sûr augmenter leur salaire. Deux tiers sont accessibles en formation continue
La réorientation, c’est la raison pour laquelle Tien-Dat a rejoint l’Estaca, pour le MS Air Operations & Maintenance en 2017. Ce jeune ingénieur était déjà diplômé de l’Insa Rennes, une école plus généraliste: «J’ai enchaîné mon stage et ma première embauche dans une société de conseil en informatique, où j’ai travaillé pendant un an et demi. Mais je me suis rendu compte que cela ne me plaisait pas. Je rêvais de travailler dans l’aéronautique. J’ai fini par démissionner», raconte Tien-Dat. Il part à la recherche d’une formation. «Je voulais des cours liés à la maintenance et aux opérations aériennes, ce mastère était idéal. J’ai appris beaucoup de choses qui me sont aujourd’hui utiles dans mon métier», explique-t-il, désormais en poste à Air France
Hausse de salaire de 10 %
Mais les MS peuvent aussi être une opportunité pour des personnes plus expérimentées. Mathilde, 41 ans, est architecte de formation. En 2017, elle décide de reprendre ses études, avec le MS maîtrise d’ouvrage et gestion immobilière à l’ESTP: «J’avais un poste de développement dans une agence. Or je ne connaissais pas l’aspect commercial, je voyais en permanence mes limites. J’ai postulé à ce MS en demandant un financement Fongecif, je voulais une double compétence.» Elle décroche un stage dans un groupe industriel, qui l’embauche. «Au départ, je ne voulais pas quitter mon employeur précédent, mais, en touchant à de nouveaux sujets, j’ai eu envie de découvrir autre chose», souligne-t-elle. Dans son nouvel emploi: une progression de salaire de 10 %, tous les avantages liés à un grand groupe, mais surtout de nouvelles perspectives. «Ce MS a été un accélérateur pour moi», conclut-elle.
Publicație: Le Figaro