Masterclass la Iaşi, susţinut de singurul român de la Metropolitan Opera
Este vorba despre ieşeanul Vlad Iftinca * masterclass-ul, iniţiat de către conf. univ. dr. Vasilica Stoiciu Frunză, de la UNAGE, se adresează cântăreţilor de operă
Începând de astăzi, Universitatea Naţională de Arte „George Enescu” va găzduicea de-a treia ediţie a Masterclass-ului pentru cântăreţi de operă, condus de către pianistul şi dirijorul de operă Vlad Iftinca. La curs s-au înscris 9 cântăreţi (studenţi, masteranzi şi doctoranzi) din Iaşi, Bucureşti şi Chişinău. „Vlad Iftinca este ieşean, se bucură de fiecare dată să revină în oraşul natal şi să lucreze de tineri de la universităţi de arte. Timp de nouă zile se vor lucra repertorii mari de operă, de lied, de la operă baroc la operă. Este singurul curs de asemenea amploare din Iaşi. Timp de nouă zile se vor lucra repertorii mari de operă, de lied, de la operă baroc la operă contemporană”, a spus conf. univ. dr. Vasilica Stoiciu Frunză, iniţiatorul şi coordonatorul cursului, alături de către conf. univ. dr. Maria Macsim Nicoară. Masterclass-ul se va încheia cu un concert care va avea loc pe 29 iunie, în aula Bibliotecii Centrale Universitare „Mihai Eminescu”. Pianista oficială este cursului este conf. univ. dr. Cezara Petrescu.
Vlad Iftinca face parte în prezent din ansamblul muzical al Metropolitan Opera (New pentru stagiunea 2018-2019. În perioada 2007-2014, a ocupat funcția de maestru pianist în prestigiosul Lindemann Young Artists Development Program, sub egida Metropolitan Opera. Începând din stagiunea 2019-2020 se va alătura echipei muzicale din Staatsoper Stuttgart în calitate de pianist, dirijor şi director muzical al studioului de operă.
Născut în Iaşi, a început studiile sub îndrumarea pianistei Adriana Bera, apoi a continuat la Școala Superioară de Muzică „Reina Sofia” din Madrid și Juilliard School. La Metropolitan Opera, în ultimii treisprezece ani, a lucrat ca pianist sub bagheta unor dirijori precum Valery Gergiev, Gianandrea Noseda, Marco Armiliato, Sir Andrew Davis, James Levine, Carlo Rizzi James Conlon și Maurizio Benini. Vlad Iftinca a colaborat în recital cu artiști distinşi precum Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Deborah Voigt, Thomas Hampson, Luca Pisaroni, Joan Rodgers, Isabel Leonard, Erin Morley, Matthew Rose și Elza van der Heever. A cântat în săli de renume ca Auditorio Nacional din Madrid, Max Joseph Saal din Munchen, Palau des Arts din Valencia, Soirées Musicales d’Arles din Franța, Festivalul de muzică de la Beijing, Centrul Kennedy din Washington DC, Carnegie Hall , Seoul Arts Center, Hong Kong Arts Festival, seria „Virtuoso” din Salt Lake City și Ravinia Festival Recital Series. În ipostaza de dirijor, a condus spectacole la Frankfurt Opera, Deutsche Oper am Rhein, Opera San Antonio, TriCities Opera, Opera on the Avalon, Juilliard School şi Opera Naţională Română din Iaşi. A lucrat la Spoleto Festival USA, Aspen Music Festival și Savannah Voice Festival. În 2017, Vlad Iftinca a lansat, împreună cu Lisette Oropesa, înregistrarea live a unui recital pe CD „Within/Without”, elogiat de critica internaţională. Angajamentele de viitor, ca dirijor, includ Cenerentola şi „Bărbierul din Sevilla”, de Rossini, la Staatsoper Stuttgart, recitaluri cu Thomas Hampson şi Luca Pisaroni, profesor la Setubal Cantofest în Portugalia şi pregătire muzicală la Dallas Opera (Don Carlo) şi Los Angeles Opera (La Traviata).
Publicație : Evenimentul
Trump-supporting billionaire gives Oxford University £150m to help stop AI destroying humanity
Vice-chancellor dismisses controversy surrounding Stephen Schwarzman’s endorsement of US president
A billionaire Donald Trump supporter has given Oxford University a record £150m donation, part of which will fund an institute charged with tackling ethics in artificial intelligence (AI).
Stephen Schwarzman, co-founder of private equity group Blackstone, said he made the donation to help people “remember what being human is” amid what will be the “unstoppable” rise of robots.
The gift will see the creation of a new humanities centre that will see the university’s English, history, linguistics, philology and phonetics, medieval and modern languages, music, philosophy, and theology and religion programmes housed together for the first time.
The Schwarzman Centre will also feature performing arts and exhibition venues.
Mr Schwarzman, a friend of Mr Trump’s who chaired the president’s Strategic and Policy Forum, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he believes AI will constitute the “fourth revolution” for humanity.
“It’s going to impact jobs, excellence, efficiency, and it’s a force for amazing good, and also a potential force for not good, and what’s important about it is it isn’t just about what it can do,” he said.
“I think the scientists agree that they want AI introduced in an ethical way, because they don’t want to experience the downsides.
“I think this is one of the major issues of our age, because AI is going to come, it’s really unstoppable. It’s not just AI, it’s robotics and all other kinds of computer science innovations.”
Responding to a suggestion Mr Schwarzman’s support for the US president could prove controversial for the university, vice-chancellor Louise Richardson insisted differing political views were welcome among its philanthropists.
“Do you really think we should turn down the biggest gift in modern times, which will enable hundreds of academics, thousands of students to do cutting edge work in the humanities?” she told the programme.
She added the “generous donation” by Mr Schwarzman, who is not an Oxford University alumnus, marked a “significant endorsement of the value of the humanities in the 21st century”.
Publicație : The Independent
Are branch campuses withering?
Overseas branch campuses have mushroomed in the past two decades, but with the risks larger than initially assumed and the returns less certain, stories of abandoned ventures have begun to mount. Ellie Bothwell asks whether the model still has a future
When Christopher Hill left the UK in 2008 to take up a role as director of the graduate school at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, the eight-year-old institution that he encountered was “a completely different place” compared with the one he left seven years later.
In its early years, the UK’s first purpose-built overseas branch campus was heavily focused on teaching, he says. But, by 2015, research activities had picked up and Hill – who was, by now, director of research training and academic development – had started to note the emergence of “student clubs, workshops and public talks – the lifeblood of what a university is”.
This gradual emergence of a campus culture, he believes, is typical of the development of branch campuses.
“In the early days…there’s still a sense of lack of identity. You’ve got a lot of people attending a university without any real experience of the place where the [mother] university comes from. And you have a lot of people teaching in that university possibly without any real experience of the place in which [courses are] now being taught,” explains Hill, an expert on transnational education (TNE) who is currently associate professor in the Faculty of Education at the British University in Dubai. “You’ve got this disconnect between international staff, local administrative staff and students. But, over time, [the branch campus’] identity evolves.”
The University of Nottingham Malaysia was not quite the first branch campus in Malaysia – that accolade goes to Monash University Malaysia, established two years earlier. But it is among the pioneering models for international branch campuses (IBCs), duplicated, modified and reimagined numerous times since the turn of the millennium – not least by Nottingham itself, which established its parallel China campus in 2004.
For their host countries, the establishment of branch campuses by universities typically from more developed higher education systems is seen as a way to drive up the quality of local offerings through the example they set and the competition they offer. And the mother universities appreciate the opportunity to create regional research bases, increase their access to international students, boost their global reputations and perhaps even make some money along the way.
According to data from the Observatory of Borderless Higher Education (OBHE) and the Cross-Border Education Research Team (C-BERT), hosted at Pennsylvania State University and the State University of New York at Albany, the number of international branch campuses (IBCs) across the world grew from 84 in 2000 to 263 by 2015, located in 76 countries and catering to an estimated 180,000 students.
The Middle East and East Asia have been among the most popular destinations for such campuses. According to C-BERT’s website, China has been the most popular location for branch campuses, with 39 as of January 2017 (with another five in Hong Kong), followed by Dubai with 32 (and another seven in fellow emirate Abu Dhabi), Malaysia with 16 and Singapore with 15.
However, the appetite for this flavour of internationalisation is clearly cooling. Since 2016, just 11 IBCs have opened, according to the data, while several other campuses in the works have failed to materialise.
The US and the UK are by far the most common sources of branch campuses, with 109 being affiliated to US universities and 45 to UK institutions (France was third, with 31, while Australia had 21). But both countries have seen recent cases of universities pulling out of branch campuses or closing them.
The University of Warwick, for instance, backed out of plans to open a campus in California in 2017, citing concerns about regulatory constraints in the golden state and “global political challenges”. The University of Aberdeen, meanwhile, confirmed earlier this year that it was abandoning its plan to establish a site in South Korea, as the downturn in the oil and gas industry had led to “reduced demand for the types of degrees in offshore engineering originally envisaged” for the campus.
Meanwhile, Texas A&M University scrapped plans for an Israeli campus in 2015, instead launching a marine research centre in collaboration with the University of Haifa.
A 2015 survey of internationalisation staff by the European Association for International Education found that opening branch campuses had become their lowest priority. The focus had shifted to strategic partnerships and student mobility. For instance, that same year, UCL confirmed that it was moving away from a model of branch campuses and towards a network of institutional and academic partnerships with universities around the world. Its Adelaide campus closed in 2017, replaced by a partnership with the University of South Australia, while its Qatar campus is set to shut in 2020.
The slowdown in growth is not necessarily a surprise given the financial and reputational risks associated with launching such sites and the serious issues that have plagued some branch campuses. The University of Central Lancashire, for instance, was rebuked by the then UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, in 2013 after it established an “unauthorised” branch campus in the buffer zone between Greek and Turkish Cyprus. It was also criticised by Amnesty International for plans to expand into Sri Lanka amid allegations that the country’s government committed war crimes during the brutal conclusion of its war against the Tamil Tigers in 2009 (Uclan eventually partnered with a local institution to deliver two courses from 2017). It also emerged in 2013 that the institution would lose up to £3.2 million in the collapse of its planned Thailand campus, a joint venture with a local businessman.
A series of interviews with leaders of UK branch campuses in 2015 found that they often had little managerial experience and rarely received enough support from their home institutions. Serving deans and pro vice-chancellors regarded such international roles as “career suicide”, according to the paper, “The challenges of leading an international branch campus: the ‘lived experience’ of in-country senior managers”, by Nigel Healey, a TNE expert who is now vice-chancellor of Fiji National University.
Several institutions have also overestimated their ability to attract students and underestimated the difficulty in navigating the local environment and monitoring standards. The University of Reading’s Malaysia campus, which opened in 2016, made a £27 million loss last year, for instance. An internal document seen by Times Higher Education notes that the outpost “opened later, and cost more than planned”, while recruitment is hampered by its location “in an area that doesn’t have the best reputation in Malaysia”.
Meanwhile, Aberystwyth University said in 2017 that it was planning to close its Mauritius campus just two years after it opened. The campus was built to accommodate 2,000 students, but just 106 enrolled in its second year.
“The 2000s were a bit of a gold rush era for branch campuses,” says Jason Lane, interim dean of the School of Education at the State University of New York at Albany and co-director of C-BERT. “A lot of [institutions] rushed in with a lack of understanding of what it really takes to operate a multinational organisation or to deal with a local education system, or even to set up a new university – because most of our universities have been around for decades if not centuries. So I think there was a lot of jumping first and then eye-opening later.” Now, he adds, while universities still “see the benefits” of establishing a branch campus, they are also more clear-sighted about “the drawbacks and the risk” – which is only heightened by the increasingly unstable geopolitical environment.
Location and numbers of branch campuses
OBHE director Richard Garrett agrees that the increasingly nationalist outlook in many parts of the world will ultimately be a “net negative” for the launch of new branch campuses.
“The most determined [and] strategic institutions will keep doing it because it’s core business for them…But for those that are a little more hesitant and less experienced, it’s definitely a reason to wait, or not to do it,” he says.
The slowing growth is a “healthy” development that might result in “better thought out, better funded” campuses, he believes. But he also suggests that the failed outposts command too much attention, and people tend to “not notice the more ordinary successes”, even though there are many more of them.
“We certainly roll our eyes when we see headlines that call out one particular failure or change of direction and imply that that means that the entire IBC enterprise is somehow implicated or imperilled. I just don’t see the evidence for that,” he says. “The idea that IBCs would somehow quickly become either dramatically successful in terms of surplus financially or would have some kind of amazing pay-off for the institution in terms of mobility or brand was always going to be unrealistic.”
At the same time “it can be quite hard to say the model is successful in a simple sense when there’s so much variation” between the different campuses, he concedes.
Richard A. Williams is principal and vice-chancellor of Heriot-Watt University, which has campuses in Scotland, Dubai and Malaysia. He agrees that this paucity of understanding regarding the breadth of branch campus types can lead to misconceptions about their purpose and outcomes.
“Branch campuses are often talked about in a slightly condescending tone. ‘Oh the university [sees] this as some sort of cash cow.’ That is absolutely not our strategy,” he says. Heriot-Watt’s campuses are “distinguished by the fact that students on most of our programmes have mobility to move between locations because we’re operating the same curriculum, the same standards, the same exam paper [across all of them]”.
None of Heriot-Watt’s branch campuses have been set up as “a far-away campus to get on with its own strategy. Ours are set up as an integral part of our core strategy,” Williams adds. Like several other early adopters, including Nottingham and Monash, Heriot-Watt has created fully fledged campuses, which have developed to offer degree programmes across the sciences, social sciences and humanities.
Another model is to build diversity via partnerships with a range of different universities on the same site. The exemplar of this approach is Education City in Qatar, which was established by the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development in 1997. As well as UCL’s Qatar campus, this hosts six US branch campuses and one from the UK and one from France, each focusing on a different discipline. The site is also home to one domestic institution, Hamad Bin Khalifa University.
Meanwhile, some branch campuses more closely resemble offices, offering just one or two specialist programmes, either as a strategic decision to fill a gap in the local market – perhaps alongside a local partner – or because they have not yet grown into larger campuses.
Dubai’s Hill predicts that the future will see more of these partnership and boutique approaches to branch campuses, as opposed to large single-university campuses, because “the level of risk is lower”. Moreover, as educational standards improve in many of the traditional host countries for branch campuses, “they’re no longer as dependent on the foreign provider. They don’t have to say: ‘We’ll take whatever you want.’”
He adds that the increasing number of universities interested in branch campuses means that, for host countries, “it’s not necessary that one university runs 27 programmes. What’s necessary is that a university leverages its expertise to run programmes that are relevant in context.”
He cites the example of University of South Wales in Dubai, which was established last September in partnership with the local aviation authority and offers courses related to aeronautics. “I don’t think we’ve come to the death of branch campuses: I just think we’re evolving to the next stage,” he says. “The first stage was about access: host countries need access to international degrees. Then it was about capacity building. And the next stage has got to be about impact and the relevance of TNE” in terms of offering courses that local students and employers value, he says.
But the OBHE’s Garrett takes a different view. He believes that branch campuses will look “more and more like the parent institution, at least in terms of breadth. It’s naive to imagine that the university that in its home country took 50 or 100 years to really achieve its current breadth and depth is going to magically appear out of nowhere in five years in another country given all the unknowns…But, no question, the most developed and ambitious ones are very much adding disciplines, adding research capacity, finding their niche, and that’s all key to their long-term success,” he says.
C-BERT’s Lane adds that branches will become “more integrated into the organisational structure” of the parent institution, rather than being something of an appendage.
Margaret Gardner, vice-chancellor of Monash University, says that the success of her institution’s Malaysia campus is “in large part” down to its “strong alignment to the broader goals of the university”, via factors such as student mobility, research activities and funding opportunities.
Garrett highlights RMIT University as an example of an institution that is now focusing on integrating its collection of sites around the world into a network: it has three campuses and two sites in Australia, two campuses in Vietnam and a centre in Spain. Such initiatives are still rare, but are beginning to occur among institutions with more mature branch campuses, Garrett says.
One example of an institution that took such an integrated approach from the offset is New York University, which established a campus in Abu Dhabi in 2010 and one in Shanghai in 2012. It also has 12 offices across the world.
John Sexton, the institution’s president between 2002 and 2015, says that what the institution has is not a branch campus system at all but, rather, a “global network”. This is “a metaphor for an interconnected and circulatory world” – although Sexton’s example of what he means is decidedly local: “the neighbourhoods of New York City interconnect and are circulatory, but everybody is New York”.
This, he says, helps to assure high standards on every campus: “Our analogy would be that much as the quality of blood that circulates in an organism affects the entire organism, what this [approach to branch campuses] does is to create an interest everywhere in maintaining the health and quality of everything in the system.”
Unlike most branch campuses, the international sites are “not designed for the local population…they’re for the global population”, according to Sexton, who is currently Benjamin F. Butler professor of law at New York. They are full research universities, with very exacting entry standards.
One of the problems with the “hub and spoke approach”, such as Qatar’s Education City, is that the branches’ lack of integration with the home campus means that it can be hard to persuade quality academics to work there. New York undergraduates choose to study primarily at one of the three main “portal campuses” but take three of their eight semesters at one or more of the other sites.
Sexton says that the network model has led to a “huge upsurge in both the quality and the attractiveness of an NYU education”, with the annual number of student applications growing from 34,000 to 84,000 over the past 15 years. He predicts that by 2050 there will be around a dozen universities with global networks inspired by NYU’s model.
“As a general strategic move, the embrace of the fact that the world is a globalised community is so self-evident that notwithstanding that there have been failures, universities are going to have to adapt to this,” he says.
Just as the branch campus model itself has evolved over the years, the host and home countries involved in these outposts are also changing: in some cases, in direct response to shifting political winds.
Many UK universities have strengthened ties with European partners in the wake of the Brexit vote, for instance, with some planning new branch campuses on the continent – partly in an effort to ensure that they remain eligible for European research funding.
King’s College London and Germany’s TU Dresden announced in 2017 that they were collaborating on creating the UK university’s first European branch campus, in Dresden. Lancaster University‘s own German outpost, in Leipzig, is due to open in September, as does Coventry University‘s campus in Wrocław, Poland.
But it is not all one-way traffic. The Technical University of Munich told THE in May that it was planning to open a campus in London, possibly as a joint venture with Imperial College London, “to send a signal against this crazy Brexit”.
Meanwhile, there are signs that US universities are becoming more interested in opening sites in Latin America: a region that historically has had very little branch campus activity, despite its rapidly growing population and its proximity to the US. Texas Tech University and Arkansas State University have launched sites in Costa Rica and Mexico respectively, while New Mexico State University is set to open an outpost in Mexico in 2021. Lane says that the state of New Mexico had to pass a resolution to approve the last, “which is interesting given all the rhetoric around the issues to the south of the US. If these [campuses] are successful…we’ll see more US institutions looking to move into Latin America,” he predicts.
Lane adds that despite the slowdown in new openings, student enrolment across international branch campuses continues to increase, which may in part reflect “geopolitical instability” and tightened immigration controls in branches’ home countries. They are becoming “new gateways into an American education or a British education”, he says.
Elsewhere, China has been a popular site for other countries’ overseas outposts, but may soon start exporting branch campuses across southern Asia and Africa – the region covered by its gargantuan Belt and Road project – in an effort to increase its soft power, Lane hypothesises. Xiamen University, for instance, established a Malaysia campus in 2015, which already has more than 4,500 students.
And while Malaysia issued a moratorium on new university campuses in 2017, it has also been actively seeking expressions of interest from institutions in Japan, which has become more interested in exporting branches. Currently, three Japanese universities are looking into opening a campus in the country.
Malaysia sees the geopolitical benefit of a growing relationship, while Japan has a rapidly ageing population and is interested in using branch campuses to help compensate for that by attracting more immigrants to the country, Lane says.
In the Middle East, meanwhile, Egypt has a goal of opening eight “international universities” next year in its nascent, unnamed new capital city 30 miles from Cairo. However, scholars have warned that such a move would pose a significant reputational risk to the institutions involved, given the country’s authoritarian regime and concerns over academic freedom. Last year, the University of Liverpool scrapped plans to open an Egypt campus after opposition from academics and students.
Garrett predicts that Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam all have potential to become future branch campus hubs as they are “very large, very fast growing, recognise the value of higher education for their own development and recognise that they need…some role for TNE to really make everything work. I think you need that combination and there aren’t too many countries in the world that fit all of those criteria.” However, whether they take off as hubs will ultimately “depend on politics and early success or failures”.
For Australian universities, the neighbouring giant of Indonesia is an obvious place to establish a branch campus. None have yet done so, but Monash is actively considering it. The university is already home to the Australia-Indonesia Centre – which undertakes research focused on bilateral benefit in partnership with five other Australian institutions – and the Monash Indonesia Representative Office, which was established in 2016 to build on the university’s academic and alumni links in Indonesia.
However, some other countries that could potentially benefit from the branch campus model have rejected the idea. India is a prime example. In 2010, the government approved a bill that would have provided a legal framework for overseas universities to establish branch campuses there, in a bid to drive up the quality of local universities. However, the country has since shelved the idea, instead focusing on its plan to create domestic “institutes of eminence”.
Garrett says that the branch campus model has always been associated in India with “neo-colonialism, profiteering and elitism”, and discussions about it “tend to get very polarised very quickly…No one, whether it’s an institution, a politician or a regulator, has managed to carve out enough space in the media to portray IBCs as net positive rather than net negative,” he explains.
Meric Gertler, president of the University of Toronto, is also sceptical about branch campuses, although his concerns lie closer to home. One of the reasons that public confidence in higher education seems to be “under siege…might be the fact that growing numbers of universities have essentially weakened their ties to their local communities by investing in other communities elsewhere”, he says.
Gertler says that Toronto has been invited many times to open a branch campus abroad but has always declined “because we think we can have access to the benefits of internationalisation in other ways that don’t undermine our tie to our local community”.
These strategies include building research linkages and partnerships with leading universities and scholars around the world, including joint research centres overseas; promoting the mobility of students and academics; and leveraging alumni abroad to provide placements for students.
Universities should have an interest in focusing on their local communities, not least because the quality of life in their local area is a “really critical factor” in attracting and retaining top faculty and students, Gertler says. He cites MIT and Stanford as examples of institutions that have risen in profile and stature “because they’ve been recognised for their impact in driving the dynamism of their local economies. It’s the strong local roots that enable a university to excel globally.”
But Heriot-Watt’s Williams believes that it would be a missed opportunity for UK universities in particular not to continue to embrace branch campuses.
“In a post-Brexit world…there remains a very strong opportunity, given the excellence of British education and its position in the world, to form effective collaborations and partnerships of different sorts internationally,” he says. “I wouldn’t be advocating a dampening. I think it’s going to develop and strengthen in the future.”
Publicație : The Times
Managing out the geniuses will end in dismal mediocrity
Promotion criteria requiring top researchers to also be good teachers and managers undermine the nature of universities, says Andrew Oswald
Universities are not in the passable-solidness business. We are in the pain-in-the-arse-genius business. I advise vice-chancellors reading this article to print those two sentences out in 80-point font and hang them over the breakfast table, regardless of spousal protestations.
Universities thrive on erratic brilliance and diversity of ideas. Yet these are being attacked. In the UK, new box-ticking promotion rules are a horrible new example, and will end in a dismally sound evenness of mediocrity.
I am sorry to have to say that most of the errors of thinking are being pushed through by well-intentioned men and women who have been influenced by – and sometimes come from – the non-university sector. Rather naturally, they admire organisations of predictability and solidity.
Imagine four boxes. Call those “research”, “teaching”, “management experience” and “public engagement and impact”. Now treat the four as having fairly equal weights. Then pass a rule that says that everyone who wishes to be promoted to a middle or senior position, like reader or professor, must get a passing minimum score on all of the four. Finally, do not ask existing readers and professors whether they think that a minimum-insistence rule is a good idea. Just do it. Then have it implemented by an HR boss or equivalent recruited from the non-university sector.
Cue frustration, bewilderment and anger.
If you do not see that such a system is likely to be disastrous for a university, you do not have a grasp of the nature of universities (and why would you if you have come from the Civil Service or an insurance company?). The unboxable tall poppies will be scythed away and deposited in the US and the continent of Europe. Regularity, reliability, steadiness and passableness will then result. Those qualities can be valuable: when I catch a train or phone the Automobile Association or order socks online, those are the qualities I want. But they are hopeless aims for a university.
Here are some cautionary anecdotes. Years ago, I was teaching at a famous university, and for the very first time we were all assessed, by the 100 students in our department, on our teaching quality. When the ranking came out, we all looked it up, of course, and a Dr X was ranked as nearly the worst teacher in the department. I imagine he was upset. A couple of years later, Dr X won an award. To pick it up he had to fly to Stockholm and wear a white bow tie. Fairly soon after, he quit for another university.
My experience has been that outstanding researchers tend to be exceptional teachers, but, unfortunately, we have to accept that, occasionally, some brilliant people do not have a spread of abilities. Google and Microsoft have also learned this. Universities need to wake up.
On another occasion, I was working in a department where the most articulate academic on television was a terrific advert for the university and his academic discipline, despite his having never, to my knowledge, published a single significant article. Another time I had a colleague who was the best office manager I have ever encountered but was a so-so researcher who could not cope with TV interviews or government commissions.
And all that is OK. The world needs uneven brilliance. Vincent Van Gogh would have been tiresome and unreliable as the manager of an art department. Moussa Sissoko is possibly the best player in the Tottenham Hotspur football team, but is so hopeless at scoring that devoted fans shout “pass the ball” when he is in front of goal. Ernest Hemingway would not have been a reassuring choice as a university personal tutor for my daughters. Marie Curie would probably have forgotten to show up for her lectures.
Universities are special in character and purpose. They are the source of the world’s ideas and, thus, their most important job is not to teach or to manage or to have immediate public impact – even though all of those matter. They are not like car factories: not even a Mercedes factory. That is why it is inappropriate in universities to have promotion systems, or any other performance-management systems, that reward steadiness and sound homogeneity. We do not need academics to be balanced human beings who can do a bit of everything.
In my judgement, research ability should be given much the dominant weight, as it has historically. A great teacher will teach students for 40 years. A great researcher will teach students for 140 years, and occasionally for 400. But not if universities’ promotion criteria have them spitting out their cornflakes and scanning the newspaper adverts for alternative lines of work.
Publicație : The Times
Students compensated over ‘dangerous’ teaching on safety master’s
South Wales lecturer shared incorrect advice on issues such as electrical safety, fire doors, and indoor barbecues
A Welsh university has offered compensation to students on a postgraduate health and safety course after an investigation found that they had been taught incorrect and potentially dangerous information.
The University of South Wales upheld a student’s complaint that, if graduates of its master’s in safety, health and environmental management put information that they had been taught by Richard Milligan into practice in the workplace, it “could reasonably be expected to contribute to a fatality (or fatalities) in future”.
The investigation found that Mr Milligan, a lecturer on the safety and business risk modules since 2014, had given “seriously incorrect” advice on issues such as appropriate temperatures to heat cooking oil to, electrical safety, and falling from height. While the review found that it was “very difficult to assess the consequences of following this advice”, it recommended that a review should be conducted into “the implications for health and safety of the information delivered to current and past students”.
The investigation into his lectures from 2016-17 onwards also found a “clear pattern of inaccuracy, inconsistency and error” in teaching on issues such as the safety of fire doors and barbecuing inside.
The probe was launched last year in response to complaints made by students on modules taught by Mr Milligan on the safety MSc and other engineering courses during 2017-18, most of which were upheld. The university has apologised and offered £2,000 compensation to students in recognition of the “distress and inconvenience caused”.
The university offered full refunds for course and accommodation fees for those who did not wish to carry on at USW. Those who wished to stay were offered a review and adjustment of the marks received in Mr Milligan’s classes or the option to repeat the modules, under a different instructor, with the fees covered.
The university was able to check the content of Mr Milligan’s lectures after they were recorded and saved on its virtual learning environment. He was found to have got “very basic scientific information” wrong, including claiming that bleach was an acid, not an alkaline, and that “voltage” was named after the French philosopher Voltaire, not Alessandro Volta.
He suggested that oil could be heated to 360°C – it could catch fire at 250°C – and told students that the “most important thing” they had to do in the workplace was to “keep your job and not be prosecuted”.
The investigation also found that Mr Milligan had given “extremely confusing and inconsistent” information about assessments, compounded by his “reiteration…that he was happy to fail students”. In 2016-17, average marks on modules led by Mr Milligan were more than 20 percentage points lower than on modules led by other tutors.
One of the students told Times Higher Education that what should have been a happy and challenging learning experience was in fact “a ghastly, traumatic experience”.
“I decided on USW because of the advertising which promised an excellent MSc course. Soon after arriving I developed serious concerns about the poor quality and about the lack of veracity of the information we were receiving from Milligan in his lectures,” they said.
Students told THE that they were angry Mr Milligan had been allowed to teach at USW for so long. However, while the investigation accepted that there had been ongoing quality issues with the courses, it said whether the university lacked adequate quality control procedures for lecture content was “more complex”, denied the university had known of his inadequacies before the complaints, and concluded that USW “cannot be held accountable for placing a high degree of trust in the external examiner system”.
The internal investigation did conclude that the content of his 2016-17 lectures was likely to have been of the same quality as the 2017-18 lectures.
Mr Milligan did not respond to a request for comment. According to his LinkedIn profile, he left USW in September and is now retired.
USW said that it “does not comment on individual cases. Any concerns raised by students regarding teaching standards are considered under the appropriate regulations and, if necessary, referred to the team responsible for managing student complaints and concerns,” the university said.
Publicație : The Times
Funding and state buy-in ‘key to reshaping Indian universities’
Government proposals to create large, multidisciplinary universities hailed as ‘important new drive’ but experts say they have ‘seen this play before’
Plans to majorly reform India’s higher education sector, which include consolidating institutions into large, multidisciplinary universities and creating a differentiated system, have been broadly welcomed – but experts are sceptical that the government will have the funding and the support to implement the proposals.
India’s draft National Education Policy (NEP) 2019 was published after Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party increased its majority in the national election. Proposals include more than doubling the higher education enrolment rate from 23 per cent to 50 per cent by 2035 and restructuring institutions into three types by 2030: research universities, teaching universities and colleges. The document suggests that 150 to 300 institutions will become research universities, while 1,000 to 2,000 will be teaching universities.
The report also bids to “move towards a higher educational system consisting of large, multidisciplinary universities and colleges”, each of which will have at least 5,000 students, by both “consolidating and restructuring existing institutions and building new ones”. Single-subject institutions will be “phased out”, it adds.
An institution will be considered multidisciplinary if it offers at least two programmes in the arts and humanities, at least two in science and mathematics and at least one in the social sciences, it says.
A source told Times Higher Education that even Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management are “expected to grow and add more disciplines to become multidisciplinary research institutions”.
The report also plans to “move towards a more liberal undergraduate education”; establish a National Research Foundation, which will provide competitive funding for research across all disciplines; and create a National Higher Education Regulatory Authority.
The government is inviting comments on the policy until 30 June, after which it will be finalised.
Craig Jeffrey, director of the Australia India Institute at the University of Melbourne, said that the NEP “marks an important new drive in India to reform higher education”.
“India’s research publication output has declined steeply relative to China’s since 1990. Extending a research culture to a wider number of universities could help to address this problem, if accompanied by appropriate resourcing and oversight,” he said.
Key factors for success include “implementation, maintaining momentum across multiple administrations, coordinating between the centre and states, and properly resourcing the initiative”, he added.
Philip Altbach, founding director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, also welcomed the proposals, in particular the plan to introduce a differentiated higher education system, but added that there have been reports recommending changes in Indian higher education since 1949 and usually “nothing is done”.
Given that higher education in India is devolved to the states, “buy-in from the states” would be crucial to ensure that the plans work for more than just “a small part of the higher education system”, he added.
Meanwhile, the target to more than double the gross enrolment ratio was a “total impossibility” if the government also wants to ensure a certain level of quality, he said.
“I might say [the report] is a good first step but these first steps have already been taken and have not yielded the changes that everybody in India who thinks about higher education knows are needed,” he said. “We’ve seen this play before.”
Pushkar, director of the International Centre Goa, which describes itself as a non-profit autonomous society that brings together academics and creative people from India and around the world, said that the report was “very welcome” but lacked detail on how large multidisciplinary universities and the three new types of institutions will replace the current structure.
He also questioned the likelihood of state universities becoming leading research universities, given that they suffer from “infrastructural deficits, faculty shortages, resource crunch and the indifference of state governments to higher education”.
“NEP reads like a statement on what ought to be rather than what can be achieved. It exaggerates the scope and possibilities of reform in higher education and is unrealistic,” he said.
Meanwhile, for Alessandra Mezzadri, senior lecturer in development studies at SOAS University of London’s South Asia Institute, the main drawbacks of the report went beyond implementation.
She said that plans to establish a National Research Foundation and National Higher Education Regulatory Authority should be seen as “a process of centralisation of power”, adding that the creation of the latter “could signal the end of university freedom in India”.
“India is a greatly diverse country, with many different languages, historical trajectories, and communities. Setting [up] only one or two bodies to take all decisions cannot but hamper diversity,” she said.
Publicație : The Times
Latin America tipped as potential branch campus growth region
US universities are opening outposts in the region to capitalise on untapped market and skirt barriers created by the Trump administration
Latin America has been tipped as a potential growth region for international branch campuses as US universities look to mitigate the impact of Donald Trump’s anti-migrant rhetoric.
New Mexico State University has become the latest institution to confirm that it is establishing an outpost in the region, with a Mexico campus scheduled to open in 2021. It follows Texas Tech University, which opened a site in Costa Rica last year, and Arkansas State University, which launched a Mexico outpost in 2017.
The region has a large youth population, and some of its countries face questions over the quality of their domestic higher education provision. However, it has historically had very little branch campus activity despite its booming population and its proximity to the US.
Jason Lane, interim dean of the School of Education at the State University of New York Albany and co-director of the Cross-Border Education Research Team, said that this might be because US universities generally do not host large numbers of students from the region, compared with Asia, which is a major branch campus hub.
But he predicted that if these early models are successful, “we’ll see more US institutions looking to move into Latin America”.
“In Latin America, historically there has been allowance for private education to develop in a healthy way, so I think branches may take advantage of that,” Dr Lane added.
Rolando Flores, dean and chief administrative officer of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at NMSU, said that the new site, which will offer undergraduate and postgraduate education and will undertake research, would strengthen its links with businesses in Mexico and help the university recruit students from the region, who might find it difficult to negotiate the US’ increasingly strict immigration policies.
“Students won’t have to apply for a visa to come to the US. They can study over there in Mexico, and they can get a degree from NMSU,” he said.
Professor Flores added that the campus would also help the university “get away from the rhetoric” about Latin America that is used by many members of the Trump administration. NMSU’s main campus is in Las Cruces, just 46 miles (about 75km) north of the frontier with Mexico, and one of its primary strategic goals is to create “healthy borders” to improve international trade.
“We think that we are better suited to be active members of eliminating those divisive issues through education, through collaboration and through cultural activities,” Professor Flores said.
However, Liz Reisberg, a higher education consultant and expert on Latin America, said it was unlikely that branch campuses would proliferate in the region.
“It’s worked well elsewhere because of humongous subsidies from the host government, and that isn’t going to happen in Mexico or Costa Rica,” she said.
She went on to explain that US branch campuses would struggle to compete with national private universities and that a limited number of families in Latin America could afford US-level tuition fees.
Publicație : The Times
Interview with Mary Fulbrook
The Wolfson History Prize winner talks about her work on the failure to bring to justice the perpetrators of Nazi atrocities, and the connection between her family history and research
Mary Fulbrook is professor of German history at UCL and a former dean of its Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences. Her latest book, Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice, won this year’s Wolfson History Prize, the UK’s most valuable non-fiction writing award with prize money of £40,000. The judges called it a „masterly work which explores the shifting boundaries and structures of memory”.
When and where were you born?
Cardiff, Wales, in November 1951.
How has this shaped who you are?
With a Canadian father and a German mother, living in South Wales – which was in the 1950s a quite closed community – I had a sense that our family did not really belong. This probably shaped a continuing feeling of always being in some sense a visiting anthropologist wherever I happened to be; and when asked the question “where do you come from?” I could never think of a good answer. But I also had a very privileged and happy early childhood, and my parents’ values have remained significant for me. I absolutely reject the view that “a citizen of the world is a citizen of nowhere”; citizenship is about so much more than parochial nationalism.
What originally drew you into the study of German history?
We went on annual family summer holidays to Germany, so for me as a child it was the most lovely place on earth. But there was also, always, the simultaneous knowledge that it was the most evil place on earth: the place where the most terrible things had happened. At no time in my life did I not know about what we have come to call the Holocaust; but I have only recently come to confront this directly in my research. As an adult, I continued to wrestle with the ambivalence aroused by German history, and wanted to explore the complexity of German society and culture over the long term.
Reckonings examines the failure, in the two post-war German states and Austria, to bring to justice the perpetrators of the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities. Why is it so important to record and show this?
Failures of justice can no longer be rectified, but they can at least be recognised, and lessons learned about collective violence and its aftermath. There was an enormous mismatch between post-war systems of justice and the extraordinary scale and character of Nazi crimes. Moreover, justice is about more than sentencing; there are also questions around the recognition and compensation of different groups of victims, and the impact on survivors and their families, as well as the legacies of shame for subsequent generations on the perpetrator side. It is important to understand the complexity of the continuing legacies.
Did your research for Reckonings take you to any places (literal or figurative) to which you had not expected to go?
It was an agonising book to research and write. I was shocked by the apparent ease with which perpetrators managed to shrug off any sense of guilt or responsibility, and former employers of slave labour refused to pay compensation, while those who had been persecuted were often plagued by the past and continued to suffer. In terms of literal places: tramping through extermination sites off the beaten tourist track – Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka – or exploring traces of ghettos; visiting former “euthanasia” clinics for murdering the physically and mentally disabled; searching for covered-up entrances to underground tunnels from a Mauthausen subcamp near the Danube; or looking for lost traces of the little-known Mielec concentration camp in Poland. And the most surprising interview was with the son of a perpetrator from Mielec, later sentenced to life imprisonment in East Germany; this son had grown up thinking his father was not a Nazi perpetrator but rather the victim of Stasi injustice.
Your mother fled Nazi Germany. How has your family’s history interconnected with your academic research?
The most immediate interconnection with my academic research came when, following my mother’s death, I discovered that the husband of her closest school friend had been the chief civilian administrator of a county near Auschwitz. He had covered up his Nazi past so successfully in post-war Germany that he rose to be a senior civil servant in North Rhine-Westphalia. I was so shocked by this discovery that I had to explore it in greater detail, to confront his half-truths and lies with the murderous consequences of what he called “merely administration” – the stigmatisation, humiliation, expropriation and ghettoisation of the Jews of his area. This resulted in one of my books, A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (2012). But I guess all my work has related in some way to trying to understand what gave rise to these world historical developments, and what were the longer-term reverberations.
If you were universities minister for a day, what one policy would you introduce?
I would massively increase government financial support; ensure that the humanities and social sciences were valued as highly as science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects; change the current student loan repayment system to one based on taxation; and ensure that, whatever happens with Brexit, European collaborations and research funding were not merely protected but further enhanced, so that our universities might remain capable of world-leading research and teaching.
When were you, or when are you, happiest?
At a macro-level: my family has been a huge source of happiness and is immensely important to me. I am also, perhaps oddly, often happiest when I entirely forget myself while immersed in research and writing on something that greatly interests me. At a micro-level: I can be intensely happy in a few places that I love to be, particularly Berlin and some other favourite spots in Europe.
Publicație : The Times
Classement mondial QS: pour la première fois, la France est éliminée du Top 50 des universités
La seizième édition de ce classement mondial des universités, le plus consulté au monde, paraissait ce mercredi 19 juin. Sur les 1 000 universités représentées, seules 31 sont françaises et 17 chutent de leur rang.
Coup dur pour les universités françaises. Le seul établissement tricolore qui figurait dans le top 50 mondial du prestigieux classement international des universités QS l’an dernier perd aujourd’hui 3 places pour devenir 53ème. Il s’agit de l’université PSL (Paris Sciences lettres), née d’un regroupement de 10 écoles dont l’Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), l’université Paris-Dauphine,les Mines ParisTech, ou l’institut Curie, en 2010. Et PSL n’est pas la seule à chuter dans l’édition 2020 d’un des palmarès les plus influents au monde publié ce mercredi 19 juin: elles sont 17 françaises à subir le même sort.
» LIRE AUSSI – Classement des meilleures Écoles de Commerce 2019
Les universités françaises baissent dans l’indicateur «réputation»
Les cinq premières universités françaises sont les mêmes que l’an dernier. Derrière PSL au 53 ème rang, l’Ecole Polytechnique est l’une des 4 seules à grimper, passant de la 65ème à la 60ème place. Elle est suivie de Sorbonne université qui perd deux places pour devenir 77ème, puis de Centrale Supélec passant de 137ème à 139ème et l’Ecole Normale supérieure de Lyon chutant de la 153ème à la 160ème place.
Pour clore le top 10 français on retrouve loin derrière Sciences Po en chute libre, passant du 221ème au 242ème rang. Lécole de la rue Saint-Guillaume est talonnée par Télécom Paris, qui fait sa première entrée et détrône l’université Paris Sud à la 7ème position pour la France, et au 242ème rang mondial. Une place en dessous, l’école des Ponts Paris Tech grimpe de 7 places. Elle est suivie par l’université de Paris, en 253 ème position et présente pour la première fois dans le classement. L’université Paris Sud enregistre une chute spectaculaire, passant de la 239ème place à la 262ème. L’université Grenoble-Alpes et l’université Paris-Diderotdisparaissent du top 10 national.
Si ce nouveau classement est peu flatteur pour les universités françaises, c’est en partie à cause de leur baisse dans l’indicateur «réputation». Elles sont 25 sur 31 universités françaises à avoir baissé pour l’indicateur «réputation auprès des employeurs», et 26 pour l’indicateur «réputation auprès des pairs académiques.» En revanche, l’université PSL jouit d’une excellente réputation auprès des employeurs, au 20ème rang mondial pour ce critère avec 98,6 points sur 100. Aucune université française ne figure non plus dans le top 100 pour l’indicateur Citations qui mesure l’impact de la recherche institutionnelle.
Les universités américaines et britaniques restent imbattables
Inutile pour la France d’espérer rivaliser avec les États-Unis ou le Royaume-Uni. Comme chaque année, les universités anglo-saxonnes occupent massivement les premières places. C’est l’université du Massachusetts qui figure une fois de plus en tête du podium, suivie de l’université de Stanford,et d’une troisième université américaine, Harvard. Oxford occupe la 4ème place, avant l’institut de technologie de Californie, l’institut fédéral de technologie de Zurich en Suisse, et 3 universités britanniques. Cambridge, le Collège universitaire de Londres (UCL), et le collège impérial de Londres.
Pour se consoler de cette médiocre performance, les français peuvent toujours se référer à la dernière édition du classement QS par discipline. Paru le 27 février 2019, il faisait état d’une belle montée en puissance des universités françaises. Sorbonne université y figure en 15ème position pour l’histoire classique et ancienne, et PSL en 20ème position pour les mathématiques, l’Insead en 2ème position et HEC en 11ème en commerce et gestion, l’agro-ParisTech en 4ème position en Agriculture et sylviculture, ou encore Sciences Po Paris en 3ème position en politique et études internationales.
Publicație : Le Figaro et Le Monde