1.702 de medici au rostit Jurământul lui Hippocrate
„Dacă voi respecta acest jurământ şi nu îl voi călca, viaţa şi arta mea să se bucure de renume şi respect din partea tuturor oamenilor; dacă îl voi trăda devenind sperjur, atunci contrariul”, au încheiat jurământul cei 1.702 de viitori medici
„Jur pe Apollo medicul, pe Esculap, pe Higea şi Panacea şi pe toţi zeii şi zeiţele, pe care îi iau ca martori, că voi îndeplini acest jurământ şi poruncile lui, pe cât mă ajută forţele şi raţiunea. Să respect pe cel care m-a învăţat această artă la fel ca pe propriii mei părinţi, să împart cu el cele ce-mi aparţin şi să am grijă de el la nevoie; să-i consider pe descendenţii lui ca fraţi şi să-i învăţ această artă, dacă ei o doresc, fără obligaţii şi fără a fi plătit. Să transmit mai departe învăţăturile acestei arte fiilor mei, fiilor maestrului meu şi numai acelor discipoli care au jurat după obiceiul medicilor, şi nimănui altuia. Atât cât mă ajută forţele şi raţiunea, prescripţiunile mele să fie făcute numai spre folosul şi buna stare a bolnavilor, să-i feresc de orice daună sau violenţă”, au rostit ieri cei 1.702 absolvenţi ai ultimei promoţii a Universităţii de Medicină şi Farmacie „Grigore T. Popa” din Iaşi.
Ceremonia a avut loc ieri pe esplanada universităţii, unde au fost înmânate şi certificatele de absolvire tuturor tinerilor medici. „Absolvirea studiilor universitare este un moment deosebit şi merită punctat într-un mod deosebit. Urmând exemplul ceremoniilor de absolvire organizate de universităţi de prestigiu din afară, am transformat această zi într-una care va rămâne un moment deosebit în viaţa absolvenţilor şi a familiilor lor. Studenţii şi absolvenţii noştri trebuie să aibă sentimentul de apartenenţă la o comunitate universitară de elită”, a declarat prof.univ.dr. Viorel Scripcariu, rectorul UMF „Grigore T. Popa”. Un moment mult aşteptat a fost premierea şefilor de promoţie ai celor patru facultăţi din cadrul UMF Iaşi. „Dacă voi respecta acest jurământ şi nu îl voi călca, viaţa şi arta mea să se bucure de renume şi respect din partea tuturor oamenilor; dacă îl voi trăda devenind sperjur, atunci contrariul”, au încheiat jurământul cei 1.702 de viitori medici, de al căror ajutor este mare nevoie în spitalele din Moldova şi nu numai.
Publicație : Evenimentul și Ziarul de Iași
Trei universităţi din România au fost declarate câştigătoare în competiţia pentru crearea Universităţilor Europene
Şcoala Naţională de Studii Politice şi Administrative (SNSPA), Universitatea din Bucureşti, şi Universitatea de Construcţii, au fost declarate câştigătoare de către Comisia Europeană, în competiţia pentru crearea, în consorţii internaţionale, a primelor 17 universităţi-pilot europene.
Şcoala Naţională de Studii Politice şi Administrative (SNSPA) va deschide lista universităţilor româneşti care vor primi finanţare europeană pentru a crea o universitate europeană în consorţiul „CIVICA – The European University in social sciences”, alături de 6 universităţi internaţionale. Urmează Universitatea din Bucureşti – cu consorţiul „CIVIS – a European civic university alliance” şi Universitatea Tehnică de Construcţii Bucureşti, declarată câştigătoare alături de consorţiul „CONEXUS – European University for Smart Urban Coastal Sustainability”, informează edupedu.ro.
Fiecare dintre consorţiile desemnate câştigătoare de Comisia Europeană primeşte aproximativ 5 milioane de euro pentru operaţionalizarea universităţii europene pe care consorţiul trebuie să o formeze.
Conform informaţiilor furnizate de Edupedu.ro, 11 universităţi din România au aplicat la competiţia lansată de Comisia Europeană.
Şi Universitatea Babeş-Bolyai din Cluj-Napoca a participat la competiţie, parte a unui consorţiu format din Universitatea din Lille (Franţa), Universitatea din Malmö (Suedia), Universitatea Mykolas Romeris din Vilnius (Lituania), Universitatea din Minho (Portugalia), Universitatea Roma Tre (Italia) şi Universitatea din Wrocław (Polonia), însă nu se află printre câştigători.
La lansarea apelului de finanţare, 57 de propuneri de consorţii au intrat în competiţia lansată de Comisia Europeană, dintre care au fost selectate cele 17 consorţii ce va trebui să creeze tot atâtea universităţi europene, potrivit surselor Edupedu.ro.
SNSPA anunţă într-un comunicat remis că „CIVICA, Universitatea Europeană de Ştiinţe Sociale, a fost selectată de Comisia Europeană ca fiind una dintre universităţile europene pilot. Au fost depuse 48 de cereri, dintre care 17 au fost selectate şi vor primi finanţare, aşa cum a anunţat Comisia Europeană, miercuri, 26 iunie 2019”.
Publicație : Adevărul
Universitatea „A.I.Cuza” Iaşi acuză lipsa de transparenţă după ce a ieşit din QS Ranking, topul universităţilor mondiale
Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” Iaşi nu mai figurează acum în clasamentul internaţional al universităţilor Quacqarelli-Symonds. „QS Ranking nu are o politică transparentă”, iar competitivitatea este „relativă”, spun reprezentanţii universităţii din Iaşi.
Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza din Iaşi nu mai apare în topul 1000 World University Rankings QS. Instituţia de învăţământ superior din ţară a intrat în acest clasament prima dată în anul 2011. Reprezentanţi Universităţii „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” au declarat că cei care fac topul nu sunt transparenţi în ceea ce priveşte informarea universităţilor privind punctajele obţinute. Aceştia au mai spus că nu pot explica de ce instituţia de învăţământ superior nu mai face parte din acest clasament, întrucât lor nu le-au fost comunicate punctajele obţinute.
„QS Ranking colectează singur o parte importantă din datele pe baza cărora realizează clasamentul. Până în prezent, Universitatea Alexandru Ioan Cuza din Iaşi nu a primit de la QS Ranking informaţii cu privire la punctajele obţinute, deşi a făcut o cerere în acest sens imediat după publicarea rezultatelor”, au transmis reprezentanţii UAIC.
Aceştia au continuat explicând că „QS Ranking nu are o politică transparentă prin care să informeze universităţile privind punctajele obţinute, dacă ele nu sunt în top 1000. De aceea, nu putem face afirmaţii speculative privind motivele ieşirii din clasament”.
Rezultatele UAIC au fost superioare pe toate dimensiunile performanţei instituţionale, susţin reprezentanţii UAIC. Însă, problema ar fi că în cazul acestor clasamente este vorba despre „competitivitate relativă”.
Reprezentanţii UAIC mai precizează că nu doar universitatea din Iaşi nu apare în clasament anul acesta. Este vorba despre Universitatea Bucureşti şi Universitatea de Vest din Timişoara.
Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” din Iaşi este condusă de Tudorel Toader din 15 aprilie 2016. În perioada mandatului său de ministru al Justiţiei, universitatea a fost administrată de Mihaela Onofrei, ca ordonator de credite.
Primele universităţi din clasament sunt anul acesta MIT, Stanford şi Harvard
Publicație : Adevărul
Alege un Lider si vei deveni un Lider! Admitere 2019 la ASE
Eşti absolvent de liceu şi vrei să ai un viitor sigur? Vrei să devii un om de succes? Alege un Lider şi vei deveni un Lider! Academia de Studii Economice din Bucureşti îţi oferă oportunitatea de a face parte dintr-o universitate de prestigiu, care are cea mai bună inserţie a absolvenţilor pe piaţa muncii autohtone şi care este liderul învăţământului superior economic şi de administraţie publică din Europa de Sud-Est.
La Academia de Studii Economice din Bucureşti ai posibilitatea să studiezi la unul dintre cele 24 de programe universitare de licenţă în limbile română, engleză, franceză sau germană, în domeniile Ştiinţe economice, Ştiinţe administrative, Sociologie şi Limbi moderne aplicate.
Poţi continua studiile la unul dintre cele 76 de programe universitare de masterat, dintre care două sunt Master in Business Administration (MBA) şi, de ce nu, să urmezi studiile doctorale în unul dintre cele 10 domenii. Detalii despre admitere găseşti pe pagina special dedicată Admitere ASE 2019 – www.admitere.ase.ro.
ASE vine cu o serie de oportunităţi pentru studenţii săi.
Având o poziţie excelentă pe harta capitalei, cele 7 clădiri ale campusului universitar se află în centrul Bucureştiului. Poţi studia în spaţii moderne de învăţământ: săli de curs şi amfiteatre dotate cu tehnologii de ultimă generaţie, 10 săli de lectură cu peste 400 000 de volume, săli de sport ultramoderne etc.
Universitatea noastră oferă studenţilor peste 5 000 de locuri de cazare în cele 12 cămine proprii, toate situate în zonele centrale ale oraşului, cu accesibilitate la mijloacele de transport în comun.
De asemenea, cantinele ASE, situate în Piaţa Romană şi campusul Moxa, te aşteaptă cu meniuri delicioase şi variate, iar un prânz sau o cină te costă în jur de 10 lei.
Cu siguranţă, studenţia este cea mai frumoasă etapă din viaţa unui om. Este perioada în care te consideri deja suficient de matur încât să poţi lua singur decizii. Devenind student la ASE, poţi beneficia de numeroase oportunităţi pentru dezvoltarea ta personală şi profesională.
Voluntariatul este o experienţă de neuitat şi vei învăţa o mulţime de lucruri noi, vei cunoaşte persoane creative şi vei creşte alături de ele. Voluntariatul este o rampă de lansare către companiile mari, implicându-te în proiecte care vor ajuta la formarea viitoarei tale cariere. Este una dintre căile cele mai frumoase de a te forma şi de a te pregăti pentru ceea ce vei deveni. În cadrul ASE sunt numeroase asociaţii studenţeşti, unde vei avea posibilitatea să-ţi dezvolţi competenţele şi pasiunile, dar şi să te poţi implica în evenimente culturale, educaţionale, de responsabilitate socială, de binefacere şi sportive.
În timpul anilor de facultate, Academia de Studii Economice din Bucureşti îţi oferă oportunitatea de stagii şi programe de internship la mari companii româneşti şi multinaţionale. În fiecare an, ai ocazia să participi la Târgul de Joburi ASE Job & Internship Fair, dedicat în exclusivitate studenţilor şi absolvenţilor ASE. După absolvirea facultăţii ai şanse reale de a te angaja în companii multinaţionale, bănci şi instituţii financiare, autorităţi şi instituţii publice naţionale şi europene, organizaţii guvernamentale şi non-guvernamentale, diplomaţie, instituţii de învăţământ (pre)universitar, institute de cercetare, firme de consultanţă, audit şi evaluare financiară, companii de IT, publicitate, vânzări, agenţii de turism şi în multe alte locuri. ASE este universitatea cu cea mai bună inserţie a absolvenţilor pe piaţa muncii autohtone, conform QS World University Rankings 2018 – 81,35% dintre aceştia se angajează în mai puţin de 3 luni de la terminarea facultăţii. ASE a pregătit peste 300 000 de absolvenţi, deveniţi specialişti de top în România sau în străinătate.
Academia de Studii Economice din Bucureşti oferă anual cca 3 400 de burse de performanţă, de merit, sociale sau ajutor ocazional. Valoarea burselor este între 580 – 1 400 lei. ASE vine în sprijinul studenţilor cu programul Erasmus pentru mobilităţi internaţionale. Anul acesta ASE oferă peste 500 de burse Erasmus. Ai astfel ocazia ca pentru o perioadă de timp, de un semestru sau un an universitar, să studiezi şi să cunoşti viată studenţească şi în alte universităţi din lume. Întreaga perioadă de studiu în străinătate îţi este recunoscută la facultatea ta din ASE. Venim în sprijinul tău oferindu-ţi posibilitatea de a-ţi perfecţiona cunoştinţele de limbi străine urmând unul dintre cele 9 cursuri facultative, gratis, pe perioada studenţiei.
Ca student la ASE ai ocazia de a beneficia de vacanţe inedite, alături de prietenii/colegii tăi într-una dintre taberele studenţeşti de la munte sau de la mare, oferite gratuit de ASE cu sprijinul Ministerului Tineretului şi Sportului. Totodată, te poţi înscrie la şcolile de vară organizate de facultăţile ASE.
Implică-te, fii activ şi alege un Lider! Cu siguranţă vei deveni un Lider! Diploma de absolvent al ASE constituie garanţia unui viitor sigur.
Informaţii complete, actualizate permanent, despre admiterea la ASE pot fi consultate pe pagina dedicată Admitere ASE 2019 şi pe pagina oficială de facebook ACADEMIA DE STUDII ECONOMICE DIN BUCURESTI.
Film de prezentare al Academiei de Studii Economice din Bucureşti
Publicație : Adevărul
Rectorul Universităţii „Petre Andrei” din Iaşi a fost condamnat definitiv la un an cu suspendare, pentru instigare la fals intelectual
Rectorul Universităţii „Petre Andrei” din Iaşi, Sorin Bocancea, a fost condamnat definitiv la un an şi patru luni de închisoare cu suspendare, pentru instigare la fals intelectual.
Rectorul Universităţii „Petre Andrei” din Iaşi, Sorin Bocancea, a fost condamnat definitiv de Curtea Supremă la un an de închisoare cu suspendare pentru instigare la fals intelectual, conform Ziarul de Iaşi. În cadrul aceluiaşi dosar, lectorul Dan Drugă a fost condamnat la trei ani de închisoare cu executare pentru luare de mită.
Decizia a fost luată ieri, de Înalta Curte de Casaţie şi Justiţie (ICCJ). Procurorii DNA Iaşi au acuzat că, în perioada decembrie 2015 – 3 iunie 2016, Dan Drugă, titular de curs la disciplinele Teoria Generală a Dreptului şi Drept penal, ar fi cerut 18.900 de lei de la un student pentru a-l promova pe acesta direct în anul III, deşi acesta nu susţinuse examenele obligatorii anilor de studii, nu ar fi fost la cursuri şi nu şi-ar fi achitat taxele de şcolarizare prezăvute de regulamentul universităţii.
„În acest context, la data de 06 iunie 2016, inculpatul Drugă Dan – Florin a primit cu titlu de mită, de la studentul respectiv, suma de 19.000 lei, din care, pentru «ajutorul» acordat, a remis ulterior inculpatului Melinte Dan 3.500 lei, ocazie cu care procurorii au procedat la constatarea infracţiunii flagrante“, spun anchetatorii, citaţi de ziaruldeiaşi.ro.
Procurorii l-au acuzat pe rectorul Sorin Bocancea că, în ziua flagrantului, pentru a îngreuna ancheta procurorilor, nu a predat organelor de anchetă cataloagele aferente anului I de studiu de la Facultatea de Drept.
Pe 7 iunie 2016, „inculpatul i-a determinat pe inculpaţii Bucuci Mark şi Bocancea Antonie Cristian, cadre didactice în cadrul aceleiaşi instituţii, să facă menţiuni necorespunzătoare adevărului în «Catalogul pentru examene/verificări/colocvii» pentru Anul 1, prin care se atesta în fals faptul că studentul respectiv obţinuse note de trecere la şase materii, în condiţiile în care acesta nu a susţinut în fapt acele examene“, se arată în rechizitoriul citat de Ziarul de Iaşi.
Curtea Supremă a decis definitiv pe 25 iunie 2019 şi condamnarea fratelui rectorului, Cristian Antonie Bocancea, la un an şi patru luni de închisoare cu suspendare pentru fals material în înscrisuri oficiale şi fals intelectual. El a mai primit şi interdicţia de a mai exercita funcţia de profesor universitar, timp de doi ani. Mark Bucuci a fost de asemenea condamnat la 1 an de închisoare cu suspendare pentru fals intelectual.
Publicație : Adevărul
Should US prisons throw open their doors to higher education?
A punitive attitude towards incarceration limits the access of the US’ uniquely large prison population to college degrees. But there are signs that attitudes are finally shifting. Paul Basken considers the arguments and looks at some prime examples of what can be achieved with a captive audience
Carlos Flores describes himself as a “creation of prison”. He was conceived during one of his mother’s conjugal visits with his father, a convicted murderer. And after a predictably troubled childhood, he ended up with his own life sentence.
However, thanks to a rare college programme operating with volunteer support at California’s San Quentin State Prison, Flores has turned things around considerably. Studying Homer, Aristotle and Shakespeare, he earned an associate’s degree at San Quentin. Now, following his release, he is starting his own business and helping dozens of his fellow former inmates down the same path, training them at the local bakery that earlier took a chance on him.
“Aristotle wishes he had the richness of this life,” Flores says. And he puts his enviable position entirely down to the San Quentin Prison University Project. This offers 20 courses each semester in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics and science, as well as college preparation courses in English and maths. Providing such courses to inmates, Flores says, changed a prison ridden with gang violence into a place of deep personal reflection and extensive, life-altering behavioural improvements. If you learn about the world and its history, Flores explains, “you can’t help but learn about yourself”.
Yet it is still unclear whether the US – with easily the world’s biggest prisoner population and one of the worst records for treating them – has learned its own lesson from the San Quentin experience and is ready to let prisoners elsewhere enjoy the same transformative experience.
There are some encouraging signs. Just as both major political parties cheered a get-tough-on-crime approach in the 1990s that crushed even modest efforts in prisoner education, both now seem to be recognising the mistake.
The US currently holds more than 2 million people in prison, the result of an incarceration rate six or seven times higher than that of most western European democracies, despite similar rates of crime. With an institutional emphasis on punishment rather than rehabilitation, educational services in US prisons are minimal and college-level options rare. But Americans are telling pollsters that they overwhelmingly support the idea, common in other advanced countries, that the criminal justice system should be designed to help inmates be productive citizens after their release. And federal and state inmate initiatives are sprouting up, bolstering a smattering of charitable models for prison-based higher education.
As well as the San Quentin project – originally a unit of the Oakland-based for-profit institution Patten University but now in the process of acquiring independence – Bard College runs a liberal arts programme, offering associate’s and bachelor’s degrees, in six prisons across its native New York state.
The political winds also appear to be blowing more favourably, amid congressional moves to reconsider the 1994 ban on inmates receiving federal aid for tuition fees – which resulted in almost all of the 300 prison-based college programmes established at that time closing down.
In 2015, the Obama administration awarded San Quentin’s Prison University Project the National Humanities Medal, and acted on its own to restore for inmates a limited use of Pell Grants – the main federal subsidy for low-income students attending college – by using some funding allocated for small-scale experiments. The 12,000 inmates a year that are benefiting represent a mere sliver of the need, given that most US prisoners meet at least minimum academic qualifications for college, according to a study published earlier this year by the Vera Institute of Justice. But it may be just the beginning. After initially criticising Obama’s experiment, Republicans have warmed to the idea, and rejected proposals from within their ranks to kill it. Influential conservative titan Charles Koch is a strong advocate of inmate education, and the Trump administration – despite a government-wide pattern of ending programmes associated with Obama – has allowed the experiment to continue, and even mooted expanding it.
Much of the political impetus appears to be a matter of highly belated self-interest. The US policy of mass incarceration costs taxpayers at least $80 billion (£63 billion) a year – and probably much more. Nearly all US inmates will be released at some point, but with little policy aimed at helping them during or after their confinement, the majority will struggle to survive and will be jailed again.
By contrast, the Bard Prison Initiative reports a recidivism rate of 5 per cent among those who took some of its classes, and 2 per cent among its graduates; across the state, about 42 per cent of prisoners released in 2010 returned to prison within three years, the majority for parole violations. San Quentin has reported a recidivism rate of 17 per cent, compared with 65 per cent statewide. And a 2013 synthesis by the Rand Corporation of 11 studies of various types of inmate education programmes over the past four decades found that recidivism rates among participants were 13 percentage points lower than among those who did not participate.
That should make clear the benefit for taxpayers, says author and activist Christopher Zoukis. He had no access to such a programme during his 12-year prison stretch for a non-violent computer-related crime committed as an 18-year-old; despite that, he completed two college degrees by correspondence from his cell in Virginia; he is now pursuing a third following his release, while remembering those he left behind.
“Do you want your future neighbour learning how to brew prison hooch for 10 years, or do you want him going to school?” Zoukis asks. “I can tell you the answer for me and my neighbours.” The data comparing education with recidivism are “just so clear”, and withholding college from inmates is “a recipe for a life wasted”, he says.
Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, Levy Institute research professor at Bard and a distinguished fellow of the Bard Prison Initiative, agrees. She cites a Rand estimate that the recidivism reductions entail a $5 benefit for every state dollar spent on higher education behind bars. “It is the one sure thing we know how to do to cut recidivism,” she says. “It’s been proven over and over again.” Hence, “It’s one of the very few issues at the moment that draws bipartisan support.”
But the consensus may not last. Some advocates fear that the recidivism argument is being taken too far. Mary R. Gould, an associate professor of communication at Saint Louis University who is now serving as director of the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison, warns against Rand-type analyses being “weaponised” by policymakers focused on short-term costs. That kind of thinking, she says, leads lawmakers to try to identify “the right dosage of education” for inmates.
In an article last year in the Journal of Experimental Criminology, experts including two Rand authors used exactly that language. “Is it sufficient”, they ask in the paper “Does providing inmates with education improve postrelease outcomes? A meta-analysis of correctional education programs in the United States”, “that an inmate receives 10 hours of academic instruction a week or is 15 hours of academic instruction required to reduce recidivism? Such questions of dosage are especially salient now, when many correctional education programs have experienced significant budget cuts.”
Gould does not deny that a reduction in recidivism is an important benefit of college in prison, but she argues that since it is not an educational measure it shouldn’t be used to determine approaches to inmate education, any more than it is used to determine approaches to college education in general. Lawmakers should, rather, contemplate providing and funding college for prisoners for the same reasons that apply to all Americans.
The recidivism statistics may also be skewed by the fact that inmate education programmes draw most of their students from among those inmates least likely to reoffend anyway. Indeed, even Max Kenner, the founder and executive director of the Bard initiative, is wary of judging his programme by its low recidivism rate, since it may imply that “we’re not taking suitable risks” on who it recruits. “How far can we push the envelope? That should be our business,” he told non-profit criminal justice news organisation the Marshall Project in 2014.
As a youngster, Flores seemed about as high-risk as they come. Eight years after he was born, his father killed himself. Around that time, young Carlos was diagnosed with bone cancer and endured gruelling chemotherapy. Not long after that, his mother suffered a serious brain injury in a motorcycle accident, leaving him to care for her as they moved from place to place across California. At some point, she added an abusive boyfriend to the mix. “School is not in my wheelhouse,” Flores recalls thinking then.
Around the age of 15, he moved to southern California to stay with a brother, but was denied admission to a local high school because his hair was braided – a possible marker of gang membership. So he moved back north to his mother, but didn’t go to school there either. Then a friend suggested a robbery. That turned deadly and, at age 16, Flores got a life sentence as an accessory to murder.
That began a life of home-made knives, survival amid violence, denied parole reviews and repeated prison transfers. It all brought him, finally, to San Quentin, whose donor-funded Patten University unit was being shaped by a college instructor named Jody Lewen into a nationwide model for higher education behind bars.
A tenth of San Quentin’s 3,500 inmates are now enrolled, with months-long waiting lists. That kind of enthusiasm wasn’t easy to generate among a population hardened against any notions of genuine compassion.
“At first I didn’t trust her as far as I could throw her,” Flores admits. He thought Lewen – now executive director of the Prison University Project – was “some kind of rat snitch, telling on people, in collusion with the authorities, to somehow manipulate us”.
Others around him wrestled with similar thoughts. Many inmates consider membership of a gang – usually formed along racial lines – to be essential to their survival in prison and beyond, often obliging the authorities to arrange prison transfers to break them up. But much of the gang activity stopped when inmates enrolled on Lewen’s programme, Flores says.
“I know some people who have died rather than [leave their gangs] – literally allowed themselves to be killed,” he says. “They would rather die than renounce their gang.” But faced with the choice between doing so and being shipped out of San Quentin and removed from Lewen’s classes, many started to think the unthinkable.
For them, the chance of education “was like a real in-depth self-help course”, Flores says. “It’s such a powerful thing when you get that kind of light…It changes the whole dynamic of the prison.”
Lewen herself recalls one student who, for years, had identified as a white supremacist: part of a mindset that led some white prisoners to refuse, for instance, to pick up a basketball that had been touched by a black inmate. One day, after taking some college courses, he took a moment to tell her about his now-abandoned ideology. “He was realising how stupid it was, that it was childish and irrational,” she says.
Jody Lewen and student Rahsaan Thomas
By the end, Flores had become not only a true believer, but a teacher’s aide. And that’s what finally put him in a position, after years of parole denials, to get released. It happened outside one of the small classroom buildings at San Quentin, when a guard suddenly emerged choking on something he had been eating.
“I thought he was playing at first,” Flores recalled. Then came a mix of emotions, fear chief among them, as the prisoner began pounding the back of the doubled-over guard, realising that it could easily be misinterpreted by other guards in the distance as an attack.
“I could have gotten shot,” Flores acknowledges – or perhaps beaten by inmates for aiding “the enemy”. Yet no guns were drawn, and whatever was caught in the guard’s throat came loose. Flores was promptly given another parole hearing, and within another few months he was free.
Much of the public failure to expect an inmate to show humanity towards a guard, Lewen believes, stems from an inability to empathise with people from such tough backgrounds, in which “bursts of occasional violence” are only to be expected. Much gang activity, for instance, is defensive, she points out: “Most people placed in these kinds of conditions would become violent out of fear or conformity or desperation.”
From his perspective, Flores sees education as a light that “reveals some very impressive men” caught in prison: “people I really admire who just made a bad, bad mistake in their pasts”.
The San Quentin programme’s liberal arts curriculum, heavy on mathematics and English, aims at putting the student in a position to attend any number of public colleges after release. Lewen was delighted by a recent phone call from San Francisco State University telling her that 10 of her former students are starting there this semester.
“I live for those phone calls,” she smiles.
But is a liberal arts education really best suited to the needs of prisoners? Or would a more vocational approach be more appropriate? Or perhaps something else entirely? Researchers remain unsure – mostly because there are so few examples to study in US prisons. To that end, a new report published this month by Lewen and Gould calls for universities to create a greater range of options for inmates and to more carefully study the results, without putting too much emphasis on recidivism as a yardstick. The report, „Equity and excellence in practice: A guide for higher education in prison”, is co-written by Tanya Erzen, an associate professor at the University of Puget Sound and faculty director of the liberal arts college’s Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, which runs a college preparation programme for incarcerated women, trans-identified and gender nonconforming people in Washington state.
Right now, for most US inmates – and especially those in federal prisons – the only option is a correspondence course. One of the best is run by Adams State University in Colorado, which has a top-level accreditation. Zoukis took an Adams State bachelor’s degree in interdisciplinary studies and a master’s of business administration while at the medium-security federal prison in Petersburg, Virginia. But it didn’t come cheap, and he could only afford the total bill of more than $30,000 with help from his family. That’s not a realistic option for most prisoners, and Zoukis was one of just a handful of Petersburg inmates taking this option – most of them pursue less expensive trade skills, such as in paralegal fields.
Distance learning also suits the current trend in US prisons towards further isolation, with video conferencing technology increasingly being installed for family visits and court appearances. But while such trends may address short-term concerns over cost and safety, distance learning is an especially poor option for incarcerated learners and encourages predatory practices, according to Gould.
Zoukis is concerned that a return of Pell Grants for prisoners could be especially attractive to unscrupulous for-profit colleges. But traditional colleges struggling with budget pressures could be just as likely to exploit the situation, Gould says: “People in prison have always been seen as a revenue stream, and it is a population that won’t demand much.”
Lewen is directly urging policymakers to avoid reviving Pell Grants for prisoners, and to instead create a system that pays institutions based on their performance in prison settings. “Pell is very ill-suited to the prison environment,” she believes. One reason is the requirement in Pell that students take a full load of courses: this may be beyond prisoners’ capacity, while the lack of performance-related requirements for colleges would offer them little incentive to maximise the quality of their service. Another concern is that, as a study in Pennsylvania found, only a third of inmates are eligible for Pell, owing to problems such as a default on a previous loan, difficulty obtaining their personal tax records, or failure to register for a potential future military draft. And while their typical entitlement to free schooling in prison up to the secondary level means that most US inmates have a high-school diploma or equivalent, many need remedial education to take college courses, and that cost is not covered by Pell Grants.
Bard’s Lagemann argues that a good college experience in prison doesn’t have to be expensive. Nor is there any problem staffing it, with volunteers plentiful. “The faculty members who teach in the prisons love teaching in the prisons. I don’t think there’s been any faculty member who taught once and never wanted to come back: they all want to teach again, because the students are fabulous,” says Lagemann, a former dean of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.
According to Gould, the fundamental point for Americans to understand is that prisons are communities in their own right. And, in that sense, they are just as worthy as every other community of having a civil society populated, run and guided by educated people.
“Prisons are violent and traumatic places,” she says, “but they’re also places where people look out for each other and they take care of each other. And sometimes people live there for their whole lives.”
Publicație : The Times
The REF’s star system leaves a black hole in fairness
With such wide disagreements in grading, the research excellence framework’s gravity for careers is unjustifiable, says Philip Moriarty
“In your field of study, Professor Aspire, just how does one distinguish a 3* from a 4* paper in the research excellence framework?”
The interviewee for a senior position at the University of True Excellence – names have been changed to protect the guilty – shuffled in his seat. I leaned slightly forward after posing the question, keen to hear his response to this perennial puzzler that has exercised some of the UK’s great and not-so-great academic minds.
He coughed. The panel – on which I was the external reviewer – waited expectantly.
“Well, a 4* paper is a 3* paper except that your mate is one of the REF panel members,” he answered.
I smiled and suppressed a giggle.
Other members of the panel were less amused. After all, the rating and ranking of academics’ outputs is serious stuff. Careers – indeed, the viability of entire departments, schools, institutes and universities – depend critically on the judgements made by peers on the REF panels.
Not only do the ratings directly influence the intangible benefits arising from the prestige of a high REF ranking, they also translate into cold, hard cash. An analysis by the University of Sheffield suggests that in my subject area, physics, the average annual value of a 3* paper for REF 2021 is likely to be roughly £4,300, whereas that of a 4* paper is £17,100. In other words, the formula for allocating “quality-related” research funding is such that a paper deemed 4* is worth four times one judged to be 3*; as for 2* (“internationally recognised”) or 1* (“nationally recognised”) papers, they are literally worthless.
We might have hoped that before divvying up more than £1 billion of public funds a year, the objectivity, reliability and robustness of the ranking process would be established beyond question. But, without wanting to cast any aspersions on the integrity of REF panels, I’ve got to admit that, from where I was sitting, Professor Aspire’s tongue-in-cheek answer regarding the difference between 3* and 4* papers seemed about as good as any – apart from, perhaps, “I don’t know”.
The solution certainly isn’t to reach for simplistic bibliometric numerology such as impact factors or SNIP indicators; anyone making that suggestion is not displaying even the level of critical thinking we expect of our undergraduates. But every academic also knows, deep in their studious soul, that peer review is far from wholly objective. Nevertheless, university senior managers – many of them practising or former academics themselves – are often all too willing, as part of their REF preparations, to credulously accept internal assessors’ star ratings at face value, with sometimes worrying consequences for the researcher in question (especially if the verdict is 2* or less).
Fortunately, my institution, the University of Nottingham, is a little more enlightened – last year it had the good sense to check the consistency of the internal verdicts on potential REF 2021 submissions via the use of independent reviewers for each paper. The results were sobering. Across seven scientific units of assessment, the level of full agreement between reviewers varied from 50 per cent to 75 per cent. In other words, in the worst cases, reviewers agreed on the star rating for no more than half of the papers they reviewed.
Granted, the vast majority of the disagreement was at the 1* level; very few pairs of reviewers were “out” by two stars, and none disagreed by more. But this is cold comfort. The REF’s credibility is based on an assumption that reviewers can quantitatively assess the quality of a paper with a precision better than one star. As our exercise shows, the effective error bar is actually ± 1*.
That would be worrying enough if there were a linear scaling of financial reward. But the problem is exacerbated dramatically by both the 4x multiplier for 4* papers and the total lack of financial reward for anything deemed to be below 3*.
The Nottingham analysis also examined the extent to which reviewers’ ratings agreed with authors’ self-scoring (let’s leave aside any disagreement between co-authors on that). The level of full agreement here was similarly patchy, varying between 47 per cent and 71 per cent. Unsurprisingly, there was an overall tendency for authors to “overscore” their papers, although underscoring was also common.
Some argue that what’s important is the aggregate REF score for a department, rather than the ratings of individual papers, because, according to the central limit theorem, any wayward ratings will “wash out” at the macro level. I disagree entirely. Individual academics across the UK continue to be coaxed and cajoled into producing 4* papers; there are even dedicated funding schemes to help them do so. And the repercussions arising from failure can be severe.
It is vital in any game of consequence that participants be able to agree when a goal has been scored or a boundary hit. Yet, in the case of research quality, there are far too many cases in which we just can’t. So the question must be asked: why are we still playing?
Publicație : The Times
One in six universities worldwide led by a woman
Data on more than 19,000 institutions show Europe lags behind leading anglophone sectors on female leadership
The lengths to which women still have to go to break the glass ceiling in higher education are laid bare by new data which show that just one in six universities globally has a female leader.
A unique directory, the International Association of Universities’ World Higher Education Database, covers 19,142 public and private institutions in 196 countries. It reveals that, while Sweden can boast of gender parity at the top of its universities – 49 per cent of leaders are women, and 51 per cent are men – 54 nations do not have a single female vice-chancellor.
The portal also reveals wide disparities between regions. North America has the higher proportion of female university leaders – 23 per cent – compared with just 5 per cent in the Middle East.
In particular, Europe lags behind the leading anglophone sectors, with just 16 per cent of institutions led by a woman. If just the 28 member states of the European Union are counted, this figure rises to 19 per cent, but this remains well behind not only the United States (24 per cent) and Canada (21 per cent), but also Australia (25 per cent) and New Zealand (28 per cent).
In Asia, 13 per cent of universities are led by a woman.
There were also “huge differences” within regions, said Amanda Sudic, the IAU’s information officer. She highlighted a number of countries that significantly outperformed their regional average, including South Africa (28 per cent), the Philippines (32 per cent), Slovenia (38 per cent), Panama (38 per cent) and Cuba (38 per cent).
“The research confirms that worldwide the glass ceiling remains intact for women in higher education leadership,” said Ms Sudic, who carried out the research with IAU colleague Juliette Becker.
“However, it also confirms that, to some extent, opportunities for women to access the highest echelons of leadership in academia is related to where they are in the world.”
Joan Wallach Scott, one of the pioneers of gender history, said that gender inequality was “a fact in every country in the world”. Even in countries with a higher representation of women in leadership positions, there was “a persisting view that men are better leaders than women”, she said.
The emerita professor at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study added that she feared that it would be “a very long time” before parity was achieved globally, especially given the “rise of right-wing authoritarian parties all over the world”.
Laurie Cohen, professor of work and organisation at the University of Nottingham, agreed that the pace of change was “very slow, with some talk but little commitment to real action to address intractable problems”.
“There is still a certain complacency, and a belief that ‘time will take care of it’, which is clearly not the case,” Professor Cohen said.
While there were “plenty of highly competent women around” to fill leadership roles, the issue was “whether we think gender equality matters, and how much”.
She made the case for “explicit, mandated transparent goals, which we need to be accountable to”. But she also warned that top-down accreditation programmes were “not panaceas” because they can soon become “overly complex and unwieldy” and “people soon learn how to play the system”.
Deborah Werner, a project manager at Germany’s Centre for Higher Education, said that if “gender parity is defined as a goal” then gender quotas, transparency in recruiting procedures and a legal framework supporting such measures could be important ways of achieving parity.
Last week Eindhoven University of Technology said that its job vacancies would be open exclusively to women for the next 18 months in order to overcome the institution’s “implicit gender bias”. Men will only be able to apply if no suitable female candidates emerge within six months.
Also last week, Ireland launched its Senior Academic Leadership Initiative, which will award funding for up to 45 senior academic leadership posts over three years and is specifically aimed at attracting “outstanding female applicants”.
Gemma Irvine, head of policy and strategic planning at Ireland’s Higher Education Authority, said that universities have to “own this problem themselves but they also need the support of the wider environment to make fundamental changes”.
Separate research published last month shows that, even if women do make it to the top, where they break the glass ceiling determines whether or not they will be paid as much as their male peers.
A paper published in Organization Science showed that, while the pay gap was closing among presidents at the US’ most prestigious universities, it remained stubbornly in place elsewhere.
Publicație : The Times
Pessimistic prognosis for subject TEF as Pearce review nears
Sector leaders predict that Dame Shirley Pearce’s review could recommend pausing subject-level version of the teaching excellence framework and refocusing its overall purpose
Sector leaders are increasingly sceptical that the subject-level version of the UK’s teaching excellence framework will survive in its current form, as an independent review of the assessment nears completion.
University responses to proposals for the disciplinary-level evaluation have been almost universally negative and one senior figure told Times Higher Education that they believed Dame Shirley Pearce, the former Loughborough University vice-chancellor who is leading the review, would reflect these concerns in her recommendations when they are published next month.
“I think she’s going to recommend some big changes,” they said. “It’s most likely to be around subject-level TEF.”
In their submissions to the Pearce review, mission groups made clear their anxiety about conducting assessments at disciplinary level, and the potential cost – put at an average of up to £246,000 per provider, or £37.6 million across the sector, by Universities UK.
Criticism has also focused on the statistical shortcomings of TEF assessments – problems that would only be exacerbated by consideration of smaller sample sizes at subject level. This broad issue was flagged last month by the review of post-18 education in England chaired by Philip Augar.
While the Augar review was broadly supportive of the TEF, some highlight that its overarching recommendations – a reduction in tuition fees, and the replacement of the shortfall with public funding – call into question the purpose of the TEF.
Plans for the assessment were drawn up under Jo Johnson’s vision as universities minister to put “students at the heart of the system” but, if the Augar recommendations are implemented, assessments of a degree’s social and economic value would rival student choice in driving funding and incentivising provision.
Gordon McKenzie, chief executive of GuildHE, said that there was “a lot of hope in the sector that [getting rid of the subject-level TEF] is a real possibility”.
“That’s the logical balance of the argument. If you introduce subject-level TEF, it sinks under the weight of its own bureaucracy,” he said.
The results of the second year of a pilot of the subject-level TEF are expected to be finalised this autumn. Like the current institutional-level TEF, a subject-level assessment would evaluate performance in areas such as student satisfaction and retention, and graduate employment, alongside written submissions.
However, the Department for Education did little to win support for the subject-level TEF with its proposed design. Originally it had considered two models: one giving broad subject areas ratings of “gold”, “silver”, and “bronze”, and another that would have seen individual departments assessed only if student metrics suggested that their performance varied significantly from the overall institutional award.
Last October it switched to advocating detailed assessments of 34 specific subject areas, alongside a continuing institutional-level assessment. Such a system would result in the largest universities having to submit 193 pages of information, UUK said.
Tom Ward, deputy vice-chancellor (student education) at the University of Leeds, said it was “fairly likely” that the review would make recommendations around the purpose of TEF. There has been a “drift in its mission…at one point it was to inform applicants, but now it has multiple uses”, he said. “The most valuable outcome would be to suggest it can most usefully be used for enhancement of education and it should be designed for that purpose.”
Sir Chris Husbands, TEF chair and Sheffield Hallam University vice-chancellor, said that the TEF had played an “important” role in “improving the focus on teaching”. “Obviously, the future of policy depends on the results of the review of the TEF and the results of the pilots,” he said.
Publicație : The Times
Claims of ‘crisis’ in campus free speech ‘are fake news’
UK government’s Prevent strategy is ‘true threat to free speech’ in universities, argues Hepi pamphlet by former US government civil rights official
Claims from Donald Trump, Fox News and Spiked about a campus free speech crisis or today’s “snowflake” students are an “ignorant, ahistorical analysis”, a new pamphlet argues.
Corey Stoughton, advocacy director at human rights organisation Liberty and former senior counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Obama-era US Department of Justice, argues that controversies over campus free speech sometimes arise “from misunderstanding…basic limits of free speech”, in a paper published by the Higher Education Policy Institute on 27 June.
“When particular academics or student groups refuse to share a stage with another invited speaker, that is not a violation of anyone’s free speech,” Ms Stoughton writes. “Someone may wish to tell that to recent ministers for universities [in England], including Jo Johnson and Sam Gyimah.”
But, citing the European Convention on Human Rights’ protection for free speech and the 1986 Education Act duties placed on universities, Ms Stoughton adds: “[When] any institution, including a students’ union, exercises a university’s power to veto a speaker’s invitation or censor a speech that someone else on campus has arranged to hear, or when any group of people are left free to directly disrupt someone’s act of speech, that is a free speech problem.”
Ms Stoughton cites the 2018 finding from the UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights that restrictions on free speech in universities were “not a pervasive problem” and a YouGov survey which found that students were no more likely than the general public to want to ban speakers whose views they find offensive.
She says universities have “always been a battleground for ideas about the balance between free speech and equality”, with the National Union of Students adopting its first no-platform policy in 1974 in response to fascist movements, while left critiques of free speech on equality grounds stretch back to the work of feminist and race studies academics in the 1980s.
“When Spiked.com or Donald Trump or Fox News engage in handwringing about a ‘campus free speech crisis’, suggesting academic freedom and the human capacity for critical thinking face extinction from a unique modern threat, when they insult the contemporary generation of university students as ‘snowflakes’ who cannot endure intellectual challenge, don’t stand for it,” Ms Stoughton writes. “That is an ignorant, ahistorical analysis. It is fake news.”
On the government’s Prevent strategy to tackle radicalisation and impose limitations on events featuring allegedly extremist speakers, she says: “There is a substantial irony in the government spuriously accusing today’s students of threatening free speech when, in fact, the true threat to free speech on campus is the government’s own policies.”
Studies have found that Prevent has led to Muslim students self-censoring or disengaging from campus life and their studies.
Ms Stoughton says: “There is every reason to believe that black and minority ethnic students and academics, as well as those of Muslim faith, will be caught up in the Prevent programme, and even more reason to know that their exercise of the right to freedom of speech, conscience and association has been compromised.”
Ms Stoughton told Times Higher Education that the free speech debate “suffers for having been co-opted by a small group of very vocal people, primarily from the far-right fringe of politics, who paint [themselves] as the primary victims of free speech violations”.
“The people who actually suffer most from infringements on their free speech the most are not the ones with public relations advisers and access to opinion-editorial pages, but people who lack political, economic and social power,” she said.
Publicație : The Times